skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently discovered mvim on OS X and it really convinced me to buckle down and start to learn and more importantly use vim again as my primary editor. One thing I find is that you need to do a fair bit of customization before vim fits for you. I stumbled onto Todd Werth's vim configs (http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/9) and they were immensely helpful to me in finding ways to make vim more useful and efficient. For most of the coding I do, vim is now my favorite editor.

That said, it does depend on what kind of development you're doing. I think that in some cases, you can make life harder for yourself by straying from what most developers in your chosen language/framework are using. If I need to code up some .Net stuff, I'm going to use the MS tools. Likewise, if I'm doing heavy Java work, I'm going to likely use Eclipse (even if it's a tad bloated for my taste). If I'm on the Mac doing iPhone development, I'm going to use XCode. Sure, I could use vim for all of the above, but these IDEs are already very well optimized for their respective languages, and vim feels a bit out of place for me.
The fact is, everyone already knows what the pertinent issues surrounding platform and tool choice are.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Every day I read a blog post about some nefarious aspect of an api/platform/company that I had never considered.

For example, I'm glad people are exposing the inequalities of the app store. Without true stories from the inside, all we'd have to rely on are the media fluff pieces of "I rolled out of bed, hacked this little app, and became an insta-millionaire"
I have always instinctually kept my business and personal lives separate. Maybe this is why.
Seconded - this is a million dollar idea! Well defined niche, great product, very useful, very catchy name and branding (totally straight forward) - can't get any better than this.

Not sure how hard it is to create a Mac OS X version as well, but that would probably not be the initial target audience.
Considering how many serious medical conditions are linked to stress, I think it's at least worth considering that health spas are a reasonable medical treatment.

Bottom line, the US spends more than Germany AND we don't get free health spas. So we definitely lose on this one.
Probably because it's not hacker news.

All kinds of stuff slips through on the weekends though.
I am indeed using the term 'Powershell' to mean both the language and the ISE/terminal. I am doing this because the authors of Powershell do the same.
You are asking the wrong question. The question is not, "how much does Germany spend compared to the US?" The relevant question is, "how much could Germany save if they put a greater effort into weeding out waste and fraud?"

My point is that you simple can't look at administrative costs alone, since there is an important tradeoff between admin costs and waste/fraud costs. To determine who is closer to the optimum, we need data on (admin+waste+fraud), not simply admin.

Similarly, you can't say "GM spends 1% of costs on programmers, while 37signals spends 95% on programmers, therefore GM is more efficient." You have to know what those programmers produce.
Gmail Offline to Access email without Internet
Now with Gmail you can access your emails in the absensce of internet connection. Access to Gmail Offline can be done by enabling new feature in your gmail account by moving to Setting. The newest version is “Offline0.2”.
I still think Twitter is overhyped...
Sorry for the emotional response. I agree.
But more or less that confirms a point: contributing to Wikipedia became a complex business; thus, the growth predictably stopped.
Great story, particularly in regard to the balance required to make the whole thing work, and to push the oil companies to innovate. It also brings to mind the essay "There are no Mom and Pop Oil Companies in Norway": http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb751...
I am the opposite. I really can't get anything other than slackware (not that I can't work with them - I can, but life just is not as simple as slackware anywhere else). Why would anyone want or need anything more complicated then a compressed tar file for package management is beyond me.

Slackware is simple, beautiful and elegant but no more than it has to be. It just works and it leaves all the power in the world at my hands. I can make it do my bidding fast as lightning and it never gets in my way. Once you begin to get the basic principles of slack, it very closely follows the principle of least surprise.
Certainly. For instance, how is App Store going to get better if nobody whines about its deficiencies? Criticizing the thing you care about is essential to its improvement.

Secondly, telling people to shut up and stop complaining is a very odd thing to do, not only because the very act of doing so is contradictory, but also because instead of everybody else shutting up, how about just stop reading? Isn't that so much easier, for everybody involved?
I was looking forward to ZFS, but there was a recent article about BTRFS that caught my eye.

What I would really like to see, though, is some modern filesystem with a license that is neither offensive to a commercial vendor like Apple or Microsoft, nor offensive to the GNU crowd, or the BSD crowd. I'm not sure that's even possible, but it would be nice to know that I could format a flash drive in a universal way that isn't FAT32.
Maybe Oracle is less willing than Sun to license their core differentiating server feature to competitors.

I believe Time Machine is still built on top of ZFS snapshot though. So obviously some ZFS code remains.

Edit: Apparently Time Machine is not based on ZFS. So it seems ZFS is completely off the map after all.
Only $10 per MB? Wow, I wish I lived in europe. Even if you're in your local calling region, it's $35 per MB here in Canada.
It's about the car that broke the steam-powered land speed record.

@ckunte please put a proper title and description in your submissions.
In Norway anyway. In America the influx of hispanics is quite enormous. Most of them are hard workers and a net boon to our economy I think, but the demographic shift is quite astonishing.
... [in aquamacs] every buffer is a separate window

Not true at all. In Aquamacs the only way to get a new window is ⌘-N, same as any Mac app. C-x C-f puts the newly loaded file into the current window, same as any Emacs.
I have a strong feeling that clojure is today's scheme. But I should probably just run away.
Can't remember the last time I saw such a fabulously written piece.
Okay, so lets say Google is your UI. What are you supposed to do about that? Does it matter at all? Everyone elses UI is also Google, if that's the case. So by using Google, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by going with the flow and not innovating.

Wouldn't it be awesome if StackOverflow did something better than a google search? Like, say, given a set of programming languages or similar projects, you could get a list of most commonly hit problems for you to avoid in the future. Or they could give you a sort of 20 questions of "did you try this" for certain difficult problems. Or anything else other than search. That's innovating.

Accepting your UI to be "Google" is giving up and letting your competitors pass you.
Easy answer. Have you ever worked in a soul-crushing job for a lot of money? Imagine working for 60% of your salary in a job you're excited about.

Money is generally thought of as the be-all and end-all motivator in corporate America. Which is why people are baffled when others choose work that's more interesting and meaningful at a lower salary.

So, short answer: hells yes engaging work counts as an experience :)
Are you on Mac or PC?

My decision to move was largely based on FireBug and ColorZilla supporting 3.5. The fact that they both do made this a no-brainer for me. The increase in speed and stability is well worth it.

If you still can't make up your mind, why don't you install both versions on the same computer?
Finally someone did a little research on this topic. I don't know why this topic is that big of a deal anyway. I know that when I was between the ages of 12 and 17, my attention would be all over the place. If Twitter existed back then, I probably would've used it a week, then went on to something else the rest of the cool kids were using.

The pie charts are somewhat confusing, though. Sometimes blue meant 'No', and other times it meant 'Yes'. Some consistency would've gone a long way.
I'm so glad somebody actually did some research into this. The original "study" of one 15 year old Morgan Stanley intern (writing about his circle of friends) should never have been taken as seriously as it was.
That's a fairly stupid characterization of what happened.
Exactly!

I think they have lost the way. And it has started affecting the project.
Actually,Time machine is not and has never been based on zfs. It is implemented using hfs+, journaling, and a kernel/fs modification for journaling and hard links. A time machine snapshot is basically modified hard link journals.
Can a Demopit company that gets the last presentation spot win th competition?
Paying people for knowledge work is a bad way to motivate them (Dan Pink)
If the point of 10.6 was to add improvements to the OS without major end-user changes, then ZFS could have been tested in the development cycle and then put on hold for the next major release.
I'd go further and say twitter is pretty much the definition of over-hyped. I can't remember any technology or company before it receiving that kind of hype. Not even google, ebay or the forgotten monstrosities during the dotcom bust.

I think this is less about twitter itself but more about a way overbloated tech news / blogsphere scene craving for content. Don't know what to write? Write about twitter.
Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars
It blew up because so many people use twitter as a way to "market their personal brand" and other such delusions so when they heard that maybe their vast amounts of time spent on twitter weren't as "valuable" as they thought they freaked out.
Well this argument is as old as the hills (or more accurately about as old as the first reverted edit on wikipedia) but personally I'd much prefer a wikipedia which only contains notable information to one which contains all sorts of random information.

Now, I don't run wikipedia, but thankfully the people who do run wikipedia happen to agree with me on this point and decided long ago that only notable and verifiable information would be included. I'm really not sure why people continue to argue the other way.

Besides, who's gonna verify all the information I write about myself?
The first four reasons why they don't use twitter give some insight:

1) It's lame
2) My friends don't use it
3) I don't understand it
4) It doesn't help me do anything

The rest of the reasons are less than 15%.
Perhaps they should have included a nuclear engineer on the team, who could have told them to use a breeder reactor to process the 'waste' into useful energy so that the remainder would only be dangerous for a few hundred years instead of 10,000. That would make storing it safely a much easier problem.
FWIW, the "researcher" runs an also-ran social network and paints itself as a twitter-competitor.

Twitter, Myspace, MyYearBook and Facebook: those are the four "social networks" he compares. One of them, you probably have never heard of (and by "coincidence", its name is a portmanteau of the names of two other networks.)
Top 6 Calorie Cutters to Fight Fat - Page 2
Given the number of people who are allergic to cats, getting a cat as a pet has always struck me as somewhat inconsiderate/antisocial. But maybe potential discomfort to guests is outweighed by the benefit you derive from having a cat.
I agree, and while there is a of of redundancy across these blog posts, the count is very useful in gauging how large the problem is.

please carry on telling us why you are/arent using the language / platform / tools you do/dont.
Basically, you need 2 things.

1) A better search interface and reference manager. If you are on OSX, Papers by Mekentosj is a fantastic option.
2) A citation search engine aggregator specific to your field. Something like Web of Science/knowledge is one of the best for my field, but I need to go via a Uni/large organisation as it's waaaay outside my price range.

Site note: In this day and age, these aggregators are a complete and utter racket. Unfortunately it's the way things are while academia finds a lingua franca other than number and status of "peer reviewed" journals for its funding orientated core business model.
No, it's "how much would Germany spend weeding out waste and fraud compared to how much it would save?" The most effective system for detecting fraud is to investigate a low but random number of cases in depth, and build an algorithm find the most likely cases of waste and fraud and then weed them out. Look at how the IRS operates for a good example of this.

PS: If anything the best number to look for would be the quality of care vs cost.

The fastest way to save money on US heath care would be to ban or more tightly regulate medical advertising in the US. In one day you could save 8+ billion a year in direct costs and far more than that in indirect costs. (If a drug company is spending a 100 million on advertising they think it's driving more than 100 million in extra sales + 20% over head from insurance companies etc.)
I've always used CiteSeer for my computer vision research:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/

I don't know how it rates for other fields though.
It depends on the size of the features the doctor is looking for.

In the US, we typically use 1.5-3 tesla machines at a cost of $1-4 million. Price goes up faster past 4 tesla, and 8 tesla reaches safety limitations.

In-plane resolution is roughly proportional to the field gradient. On 3 tesla machines, you can get voxels on the order of 1mm x 1mm x 2.5mm [1]. On a 1.5 tesla machine, you get 2mm x 2mm x 3mm. I'm told Japan typically works in the 0.5-0.75 tesla range, so expect resolution at least as bad as 4mm x 4mm x ??. (I don't know how thick their imaging plane is.)

Artifacts are also considerably worse on low resolution machines.

SNR and CNR (contrast/noise ratio) is also better with higher tesla machines.

[1] Some people claim better resolution, but that's mostly M.D.'s who don't understand signal processing. You can make images with pixel sizes representing 0.1mm x 0.1mm, but they usually don't convey extra information.
Anything out of BSD land would have a compatible licence with both commercial vendors and the GPL. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER

If your talking about writing something and being sure to be able to read it at some future time UFS is read-compatible pretty much everywhere.
I've seen good patterns for state machines in Smalltalk with states as objects and states as methods (on an FSM object).

With states as methods, you have an instance variable for "state" and you just run a loop:

[ self state == #final ]
whileFalse:
[self getNextInput.
self state: (self perform: self state)]

Each method then becomes a concise description of the state transitions:

code
self atEndOfInput
ifTrue:
[^#final]. "Go to #final State"
self input == $"
ifTrue:
[ self writeToOutput.
^#insideComment]. "Go to #insideComment"
^#code "Stay in #code"

insideComment
self input == $"
ifTrue:
[^#code]. "Go to to #code"
^#insideComment "Stay in #insideComment"

Then debugging just becomes a matter of putting breakpoints in methods. #perform: is almost as fast a a regular message send, and the methods themselves are mostly #ifTrue: statements, which are bytecode optimized, so this is mostly JIT-ed to machine code.
Good to know, thanks for the quick response.
pyre, why do you suggest that managers cause deaths? The #4 in your second thought experiment doesn't make any sense. It would make more sense to write:

1.) Managers impose deadlines and put pressure on employees to meet them

2.) Employees do sub-standard work to meet deadlines

3.) Sub-standard components cause deaths

4.) Therefore employees doing sub-standard work kill people

That would be an argument to jail all the workers at companies whose products do harm.

Or you could write:

1.) Companies exist to make profits

2.) The profit motive encourages some companies to cut corners

3.) Cutting corners sometimes leads to death

4.) Therefore, the profit motive causes deaths

That would be an argument to get rid of the profit motive, but it wouldn't be an argument to increase punishments over whatever base line of punishments already exist.

Or how about:

1.) The law holds corporate executives responsible for the financial performance of their companies.

2.) The profit motive encourages some companies to cut corners.

3.) Cutting corners leads to situations where people die.

4.) Therefore the law is causing people's deaths.

That would be an argument for punishing those who create the laws, rather than those who obey them.

Or what if we take this logic to its extreme?

1.) The people of a democracy elect representatives to create laws.

2.) The law holds corporate executives responsible for the financial performance of their companies.

3.) The profit motive encourages some companies to cut corners.

4.) Cutting corners leads to situations where people die.

5.) Therefore the people who elected the representatives who created the laws are causing people's deaths.

In this last scenario, all of the people in the nation deserve to be punished.
I think you're missing the point; it's not that you should innovate, it's that the majority of your users will be using google and then find your site. You can innovate all you want but if no one knows about it or uses it then it doesn't really matter.
Pretty sensible reasons there.

I can't see much point in a teenager using twitter. Teenagers spend every weekday at the same school as most of their friends anyway, and at any given time their friends are doing pretty much the same thing they are. "Sitting in class. Bored."

It's only when you get older and your friends get a bit more diverse and spread out and more likely to be engaging in interesting activities that twitter becomes less dull.
Some “Developers” Just Can’t Develop
* As of 2000 (the latest report with country ranking) the WHO rates America #37 in overall effectiveness in healthcare, whereas Germany is #25 (#1 is France, which also has universal coverage): http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/

* According to the CIA world factbook, we're ranked #35 in life expectancy, Germany #23: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

* Again according to the CIA world factbook, the US is ranked #46 in lowest infant mortality rate, Germany #15: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...

In terms of production, as well as in spending, Germany kicks our butt (as does the UK, France, etc.) If we can reduce costs and at the same time get free spa visits, I'm all for it!
Ask HN: Review http://browserpop.com
I got fed up with maintaining different bookmark bars across all my machines/browsers/phones so put this together.

It's a quick launchpad for your most commonly used sites and supports opening multiple links in one go, which I find useful when I want to surf the news. I also plan to add an option to make your links public so that you can share them with your friends as I'm always being asked which sites I use the most.

It's not supposed to be a competitor to delicious and the like, just needed to scratch an itch for myself. Hope some of you find it useful and would love to hear your feedback.
Your question is the correct one. That's actually what I was thinking, if not what I said. :)

Concerning quality of care vs cost, that's also irrelevant. I don't want health care, I want health. Health outcomes vs cost are the relevant quantity, but it has not actually been shown that quality of care significantly affects health outcomes.

I submitted an article on this topic previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775284
Most websites' primary traffic source is search engines, the lion's share of which is Google. Websites that are otherwise are rare, so optimizing your pages to match what people are searching for is pretty important.

You can innovate with in-site search, and StackOverflow does, you can browse by tags, you can do string searching, you could even do interesting things with analytics regarding who browses what questions when, but if you can give people a page that corresponds to what people are looking for on Google, then that'll deliver a lot of value.
I'm going to try it at work on Monday. If I like it, I'll buy it. You don't know how many times I've had to export a csv to do some sql on it, then import it back into excel.
I was in Oslo last week - there's large parts of town where it's quite easy to tell the difference. Anyway, this isn't the right forum for this discussion...
The comments are scary.
Continuing Your Education 140 Characters at a Time – FreelanceSwitch
Summary: There is still no ZFS in Snow Leopard, we still don't know why. Let's speculate.
Feature Idea: Compile to "Vlookup" or compile to VBA.

In other words: I build a spreadsheet with QueryCell, but I want people who don't have QueryCell to be able to use it.

So I hit "Compile", and the program generates standard formulas using hlookup/vlookup and/or VBA so that the spreadsheet works for those who don't have the Plugin. (Of course it adds a link to "Built with QueryCell" :)
That's great to hear. If once you've taken a look you have any feedback, positive or negative, I would love to hear about it. The contact details are on the site.

Cheers
Two alternatives you could check out:
http://www.scitopia.org/scitopia/
http://scirus.com/srsapp/
But are these 'additional cmdlets' going to be available in a default O.S. install? If not, will they be automatically brought in by Windows Updater?
I looked at the edit in question. He didn't just add in his opinion on wikipedia out of the blue, he corrected a misstatement of his opinion by someone else.

In the end, the whole sentence was removed by a third party on the grounds that Knuth's opinion on wikipedia really doesn't matter enough to be part of the Knuth article anyway.
Thanks for the idea caffeine.

I don't quite follow though. To use querycell you load a normal Excel file into Excel. You can then open the QueryCell pane to query the regions of data in the open worksheet/workbooks.

The result sets returned from queries are then added to a new 'resultset' worksheet.

So as it stands you can pass around spreadsheets you have used with QueryCell to people without QueryCell.

Let me know if I misunderstand.

Cheers
Hey, PC, Who Taught You to Fight Back?
The WHO rankings do not measure effectiveness in health care. They measure a weighted average of many factors, most of which are unrelated to health care effectiveness:

25% health

25% health equality

12.5% responsiveness

12.5% responsiveness equality

25% financial equality

Near as I can tell, only 12.5% of the score (responsiveness) is directly related to health care effectiveness.

Remarkable fact: an improvement in health care can actually lower a score if it is unequally distributed (e.g., half the country gets better health care at higher cost, half the country stays the same).
Do you think this would be an improvement on wikipedia as it currently exists?

Would this "debate" style extend to every contentious issue? Will the article on Theodore Roosevelt have to be interrupted by a pro-con debate on whether Theodore Roosevelt was actually a woman, if someone decides to suggest that he was? How many other crazy theories can we raise before the article becomes totally unreadable?