skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other hand, by dint of being so loud, they've given even the quiet hackers some well-deserved recognition. Intellectualism has too long been shunned in the main stream. It's finally become sort of (dare I say it?) cool to be a hacker.

Thus, their volume has contributed some social capital to us.
British national health service. I've had a lot of health problems in the past, but money has never become part of it. A for-profit organization deciding on whether you get treatment or not has always seemed a little sick to me.

Not to mention leaving 70,000,000 people without any or proper healthcare, which is quite frankly disgusting. Even the poorest Briton can rely on the NHS…
I still don't get it. There have been several things I never got or rather they were so obvious / intuitive to me there was nothing for me to "get". Still I spent years thinking I missed something cause so many others had such problems with them. Pointers & recursion come to mind.

There just doesn't seem that much to REST (that's not a bad thing). Lot's of hype, fud, misunderstanding built up around REST. Arguments over the proper way to apply REST to HTTP/Web. But, REST itself seems sort of duh, how else would you do it?

It's not magical rocket science, right?
I've recently started an(other) effort to lose my excess weight. Since this time I am on the web I have been looking for more research. It appears there is very little useful information available. The biggest problem, it appears to me, is the lack of any financial incentive to run large controlled trials of diets as there is in drug trials. What we really, really need for nutritional science to advance much more, is for large-scale controlled experiments, but without the millions of dollars drug companies put into testing their products, in the hopes of making it back from sales on successful drugs, it is not going to happen.
> it's the closest you can get to understanding how computers work at a low level without dropping into asm.

Though your points are pretty valid, the parent wasn't arguing that C was at the lowest level.

Plus surely you can provide your own low level implementation of malloc and free for the platform and you'll still be programming C.
I didn't mean to indicate that automated testing is innovative. Just that laziness can cause innovativeness within oneself.
I actually filled out the form for more info (http://sfcube.com/apply.php)...the terms and conditions link didn't go anywhere and after 10 attempts to get the captcha right I gave up. When I got the captcha wrong it posted back and deleted the entire form which only the back button fixed. Get a clue guys! After browsing the site some more though I was glad they didn't get a hold of my info.
Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack
Interesting side note: Recovery.gov runs on Drupal.
Interested in doing interactive photography?

http://openviewproject.org/

DIY+OSS FTW.
I'm a woman, and I didn't find this patronizing or sexist, unlike some of the commenters on both the post comments and here.

I've gotten much more into web development in the past couple years, and this post reminds me of a handful of precious conversations I've had with incredibly smart people who took the time to bring together concretes and abstractions together in a way I could understand. I think this is a good post to share with other no-so-technical-people who you wish understood more about what you do.

Maybe I should write a post on "How I Explained Marketing to My Husband"
Ask HN: infrastructure in a box for distributed team
Due to a company going under, myself and some fellow developers have been encouraged to start something ourselves. We have an idea we feel strongly about and have started prototyping the code. We really don't want to spend time building or maintaining infrastructure.. and we have the money to pay for a solid one. Can anyone recommend some good hosted infrastructure in a box for a software dev team? Eg. we need the usual mail, web, bug tracking, source control, etc etc.

We're thinking of going for google apps for mail/chat/basic-word-docs. For development infrastructure we'd rather have a single integrated service rather than pay different people for different pieces. We need security, and we want it managed for us. We'll run our own development/qa/prod servers since we have special needs (cuda hardware, special OS versions etc) but don't want to run the generic infrastructure.

Any suggestions? We'd be happy to support HN companies..
The best college professors I have had were working professionals who taught on the side or people who otherwise still had some hands-on experience with the subject they were teaching. There's a reason we have the cynical expression "It's academic" as a means to dismiss something as irrelevant to the real world. I generally hate wasting my time on "Ivory Tower"/"It's nice In Theory" type of learning. That stuff not only doesn't prepare you for the real world, it's counterproductive because it's got you thinking stuff that doesn't really work and spending time on stuff that doesn't really work...etc.
Wow, thanks for pointing that out - it was fascinating to read.
Very cool, windsurfer! I like the subversive undertones, as well. :)

Hopefully we'll have our bot API ready for public consumption soon. I'll let you know. We've taken most of our UI cues from irssi, so I bet our interface, although it's a web interface, is pretty similar to yours.

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's all over standard HTTP ports, so hopefully your IT department won't notice. :)
Netflix might be convenient enough to make people not bother trying to find torrents (and worrying about getting sued). I think in many cases it's not the price that's the deterrent, it's the hassle of having to actually go to the store.
British don't like American attacks on their healthcare system
I don't spend much time on the phone and I recently dropped my own landline to save a few bucks. I bought a Tracfone last Christmas. After some discount I had, it was about $145 for 14 months prepaid -- including phone, minutes, and double minutes for life. As long as I don't go over about an hour of calls a month (and so far I'm doing even less than that), it will work out to just over $10/mo for the first 14 months. My landline was around $50/mo. I kept the landline as long as I did in part for a reason I don't seem to see mentioned here: If there is a natural disaster and power is out and you need to call emergency services, you can pick up your landline and it will work. Of course, this assumes you have an old fashioned phone hooked up to your landline and not one of those newfangled wireless phones. Those require electricity to work.

The next time I buy minutes for my Tracfone, I plan to get another $100 card good for another year. So next year, my "monthly" (average) phone bill will be even less than it is now, assuming of course I continue to use the phone very sparingly.
Ask HN: Why do Internet dating sites charge the same amount for men and women?
I would expect profit to be maximized at a point where men are charged more than women (I am assuming that there is greater demand for internet dating among men).
Maybe Netflix with all the latest content is good enough, but 30 day delayed Netflix isn't. This is such bullshit. The only thing unhappy Netflix users can do is cancel their membership, which is (I'm sure) nothing but good news to the movie studios. Boo!
He is the editor of Lifehacker and has written a few application before:

http://adampash.com/projects/

So he is not a newbie who had to learn how to program.
SCTP, where one or more endpoints are mobile and occasionally disconnected. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2960.txt

Or protocols for personal area networks; for instance the suite of protocols that would be needed for a personal soundtrack to follow you from your home to your vehicle to your office w/ multiple endpoints some public, some private.
For some people (not sure how many) there is just a small barrier to downloading movies illegally. You have to dip just below the 'honesty' layer and search for links in slightly questionable places. There's that feeling of being subversive and opening up yourself to a little risk (however minimal). This barrier can be just big enough in order to prefer things like Redbox or Netflix over it, but not big enough to make people go back to spending $5 to watch a movie at home.
Sorry to say this but .. I agree with your friend. Your qualifications are pretty much irrelevant in an email; mentioning them anyway may well be taken negatively by some people.

Still, at least it's a respectable degree. I once had to converse regularly with a guy who signed his emails "(full name), M.C.S.E.", flaunting those letters like they were equivalent to Medical Doctor or Order of the British Empire or something. Needless to say, merciless ridicule ensued.
Assuming you are referring to the US, the actual number is 46.6 million. Even that number isn't a complete picture.

14 million of the uninsured are eligible for free government insurance (medicaid/SCHIP), but just haven't bothered to sign up. Another 27 million earn at least $50,000/year and just want to spend their money on other things (70% of these people are uninsured for 4 months or less, so they are probably just declining COBRA).

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/25/who-are-the-...

That only leaves 5.6 million people.

Fun fact: there are about 11 million illegal immigrants in the US, according to wikipedia.
Get it while it's cheap: Pinboard's revenue model
I would love to give this as a try as an experiment for a social news site for technology. "Digg without the 17 year olds in mom's basement"
Be a big business for small bucks - rent a virtual office
Our intro to computing class involves learning about gates, an academic architecture (LC-3), programming in bytecode, programming in assembler, learning how we assemble the bytecode into assembler, then learning C. Our final project is a basic compiler from C to ASM given an AST.

I think it's a great way to learn about the way a machine works in one semester :)
I took CS 2340 in Smalltalk a year ago at Georgia Tech. I think most people in the class disliked the IDE more than Smalltalk itself. Visual works was absolutely unusable on a mac and the Windows version certainly had its quirks. That, coupled with the fact that Smalltalk isn't used too often anymore led to students being really unsatisfied with the language.

I do think that the language needed to be changed for that class. The College of Computing is not entirely C though; I did learn lisp for an Artificial intelligence class, but not all students are required to take it.
jshub.org is down for me and I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what this does.

So it collects metadata about pages and I can write a plugin that uses it to do something? huh?
Shibboleth, Google Book Search, and the Hello Kitty Diary
Thanks for the article, there is lots of great info on there. I need to figure something out where I can make secure backups to some remote server. I guess there is no real perfect solution, but TrueCrypt looks good. I ran across this one talking about some deeper security constraints with this that I think offers a nice insight. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/truecrypts_den...
I'd like to start a group for "Startup Types". Interested?
I do not play MMORPGs, I have played many games in the past, mostly FPS and C&C style games, but gameplaying has seriously declined as freetime becomes more sparse and increasingly valuable for other endeavors.
Fat Head - You've Been Fed a Load of Bologna
"I can see the number of things retweeted in general take a nosedive."

This would not be a bad thing.
I believe the choice of C isn't really about "how computers work" as much as "how algorithms work", with C only providing a minimal toolkit of architecture-independent efficient high-level functions that allow for a simple mental model of how algorithms in higher-level languages work underneath, which is extremely useful in the real-world for getting a good overview of algorithm efficiency.

Another good reason is that C is useful as a sort of mid-level psuedocode. This pseudocode is useful for providing a mental model that allows you to make the leap from a modern high-level language to C to an assembly language much more easily than making the straight cognitive leap from a high-level language to the specifics of an assembly language or architecture.
Didn't Microsoft already try basically this, and fail spectacularly, with Passport?
I think that any programmer worth their weight must disagree with the larger message you're giving here.

C does _not_ suck at networking, concurrency, security, or readability.

Most code you write in a 'modern language' like Java, Python, or something similar, is implemented on a very low level in C. So those nice, clean, safe networking functions Python pulls out of nowhere are just well written C code being presented to the user through layers of abstractions. The same goes with modern type-safety and security (that 'proofed' kernel from a few days ago was Haskell mapped into C).

From a readability standpoint, C represents a tradeoff. The core C API can be kept in its entirety in a programmer's mind. Starting from scratch, you are able to know (essentially) every language feature C has, how to use it, and what side-effects it could cause. Compare this to Java, Python, or even C++, and you get into a scary world that's just too big to keep in mental RAM all at once - but a lot closer to english and more compact.

There was an article which came out a few days ago talking about how C has been and will continue to be the top choice for software over C++ _and_ assembly in embedded projects over the past 12-15 years. Given that embedded systems make up something like 98% of the computer market and the number of computers grow with each passing year, the argument should flow the opposite way:

Every year that goes by, C becomes more useful.

In addition, it's an ideal language for teaching the notion of pointers, the reasons for security, the value of good program structure, and yes, it's difficult. If you teach people to be comfortable dealing with C, they'll feel like Python is pie. (or.. py :P)

All that said, I cannot disagree with the value of functional, object oriented, or other paradigms being taught to students. Many people do not really learn to deal with recursion until they've learned a dialect of Lisp. Many people do not really learn the power of design patterns and the object model until they've written something in a high level language that uses it (take your pick).

The fact that these are good things to be exposed to and to use does not in any way diminish the importance or usefulness of C for both career programmers or computer scientists.

tl;dr: "C is still good too homg"
GitHub Talk on Social Coding at Yahoo
Yea the beginning started like a movie so I thought it was an animation. Also the title didn't really hint that it was interactive.
Faster than Opera too?

Edit: Yes, at least the Javascript engine is significantly faster on this benchmark.

On Chrome 2.0.172.39 on Windows I scored 1051.2 ms, on Firefox I scored 4633.8 ms, and on Opera I scored 6230.2 ms.
The Case of the Temporary Registry Profiles
(removed insults)

"Wrong and proud of it", huh? There's no valid reason for that.
Much of the information in this video is incorrect and makes the same mistakes that the general media makes when trying to explain high frequency trading. In particular, it fails to mention the fact that pre-routing exposure to local exchange members is an optional feature of orders (i.e. when you send an order, you can choose whether it is a flash order) and thus cannot disadvantage the sender, it incorrectly explains what an automated market maker is, fails to correctly explain the rules of NMS routing, and misstates the role of liquidity rebate in high frequency trading.
Palm Pre owners love their phones, but not as much as iPhone owners
Example of what happens when your medical device just plain doesn't work:

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1N1-118387E2698885C8.html

Example of what happens when you give 'deal sweeteners' to get your device into a health care facility, or IDN (Integrated Delivery Network):

http://physicianlaw.foxrothschild.com/2009/03/articles/fraud...

Just a couple off the top of my head, many, many more just Lex/Nex it. Or probably better, if you are thinking about getting into this area, PLEASE, talk to your lawyer.

Punishments are generally so harsh because it is considered fraud. The defendants were selling software that didn't work. They either knew it did not work, in which case it is pretty much straightforward fraud, and God help them if someone dies. Alternatively, they did not know that the software did not work. In which case they committed fraud when they represented themselves to the health care organization that purchased the device as being qualified to make a determination as to the efficacy of the software or device. Again, God help them if someone dies.
And the reason those articles stated was that people were leaving for "whiter cities"? I think that's a stretch. The last I heard a lot of people were leaving California because the white collar jobs were leaving California. As I'm sure you're aware, there are more white people working white-collar jobs, so maybe that's the reason, eh?

If those articles said that people were leaving because California wasn't "white enough" or whatever, I'd love to see them.
So... the answer is stop publishing and switch to aggregating?

Sorry, but I'm not seeing how building a better filter enables you to raise the money for an investigation that uncovers secret NSA wiretaps.
Classic! I just sent an e-mail nominating these guys for the Ig.
Whole Foods CEO has enraged his target demographic with right-wing rhetoric
I give him one week.
Last time I checked (10 years ago) they didn't.
Animation showing the expansion of the International Space Station
I'm guessing Facebook ain't exactly thrilled by this news.
Modeling a zombie outbreak as an infectious disease
Ask HN: Is PLR/MRR/RR "rebranded" marketing content bad for UGC sites?
So I've never been a fan of affiliate marketers, and I'd heard about "private label rights" (PLR) and "master resell rights" books before, but lately I've noticed these things seem to be everywhere. They're all over docstoc, scribd, and issuu. I've even seen people sell them on ebay.

Examples: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/5836713/How-To-Be-A-Successful-Forex-Trader
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7236710/Newbies-Guide-To-Resale-Rights

Anyway, I can't imagine these are good for sites made from UGC. I mean, this stuff is basically spam. Does anyone have any experience with this? Like, do they significantly drag down user experience? Does Google penalize this stuff? Is it actually effective marketing?
Dav Glass isn't mic'd during the intro - I promise the sound improves.
Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
Cheat for iPhone FREE for the weekend... maybe longer
What's he's talking about really is strong filtering.

Current filtering systems weight user contributions equally which means trolls and other junk get in there easily.
"So, if you are a Whole Foods shopper, please consider honoring the boycott, at least for a short period of time. The impact will be very evident, and almost immediate."

I have a different idea.

If you are a liberal who shops at Whole Foods, and you read John Mackey's article with his ideas about health care reform, why don't you think about whether the solutions he's proposing -- and has successfully implemented among thousands of happy, healthy Whole Foods employees -- might be worth some serious consideration.

Instead of, you know, rejecting his free market ideas out-of-hand with insulting ad hominem attacks and threats of a hard-line ideological boycott.

Tolerance, civility, honest debate, etc.

Just sayin'.

Because Whole Foods has been amazingly successful as a company in recent years. And they do have thousands of employees. And I'm fairly sure that those employees like being able to keep the majority of their health care dollars, instead of having them thrown away on overly comprehensive health insurance policies they don't want or need.
Happily, no. If you load up the address in street view, you'll see that she, like a few other people on that stretch of sidewalk, is just sunbathing. (And not naked, for that matter).
We tried Yammer in a team of 12 - 15 devs. About half of them liked it. The other half thought it was "yet another annoying, distracting thing to take me out of my 'flow'"
Police called to Gosselin home
Organic Food Isn't More Nutritious
Wow. Just wow. I cannot believe the WSJ was tricked into thinking this was a legitimate business.

First of all, the design of the page is hideous. Very CPU intensive as well. The text blurbs at the bottom are very poorly written.

Secondly, the main goal seems to be selling the O1-3 service to entrepreneurs, not funding them.

Further, if you look on the investors section, they have copied and pasted PGs essay on starting a company in a recession verbatim, though they do credit him.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the red flags telling me the company is not legit.

I am amazed the WSJ fell for this. I suppose next week we will be hearing about all the free iPods waiting to be won, and how people can make millions just by posting a link on Google.
It'd be similar with me, except she wouldn't say "Some other time honey" because she frankly wouldn't be interested one jot in something like how the Web works.

Actually, I suspect it'd end with a different line 3: "So what do you want for dinner?" or "When are you going to put up the shelves?" LOL.
An OS call is a lot closer to "the way computers work" than a call to a managed runtime environment on a virtual machine running on top of the OS.
Haha and I was thinking the other day reading ms tech bulletins that MS always has such a long list of affected software!. Look at this: 473 different versions
Anger across Britain grew by the hour yesterday as details spread of the US adverts showing across the Atlantic.

No it's didn't. The "average" Briton cares as much about the US healthcare debate as Americans care about British politics. The only reason this is a story is because August is "silly season" in the British media and they're looking for any story to cover or any angle to manufacture. The anger is all manufactured and amongst the liberal media only.
The blogger seems to be trying to drum up page views by using sensational rhetoric...

I did think it was a bit weird to see the Whole Foods CEO writing that particular op-ed.

BTW it should be noted that Whole Foods sells mostly fats, highly processed carbs, cheeses, and wines to people who pay more b/c they are convinced that the food is more nutritious just because it is organic, etc.

People who blindly follow Whole Foods' marketing are the same sort of people who will blindly support health care reform as it's evolved thusfar... the current proposals have no clear specifics, focus on "evil corporations", and do little to change the perverse incentives that exist in today's heavily regulated, heavily subsidized healthcare industry.... similarly most Whole Foods shoppers are fat and unhealthy.

If you are skeptical of my statement, consider that nobody has yet been able to write a hypothetical sad story about a loved one who would be worse off under universal care -- this is not because some people would not be worse off, but because insufficient specifics have been released to make such a hypothetical story possible.
> e.g., Lisp programmers are more productive and generate fewer bugs

Lisp programmers tell themselves they are more productive and generate fewer bugs.
I dont get it. Why do I have to contact a web service for sending an SMS through a phone or modem that's directly connected to my computer? How does it help anyone?