skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well played. My exact reaction to most of these studies.
Well, if you reject the iPhone (I haven't) and buy a Palm Pre, you are still affected by Apple's anti-competitive iTunes dance.

I'm a huge Apple fan, and I'm extremely sorry to see them turning out to act more like douchebags each day.
Google doesn't try and impose themselves between me and the information I'm looking for

Google's core business revolves around interposing itself between you and the information you're looking for. Google Image search excludes certain content from by default. Gmail filters spam by default. YouTube forbids many kinds of content. They do these things because people want these things. If they filtered information that people did want to access, they would be more likely to call it censorship instead of a useful service.

I may not like what they're doing in China but I recognize that they have a gun to their heads and that they are being forced into the role of censor.

Utterly untrue. Google is absolutely not forced to do business in China (or any other country that they alter their results on behalf of). They choose to censor themselves in order to access that market. (In crystal clear terms: Google censors itself on behalf of government in exchange for money.) If you are morally opposed to doing business with companies that are complicit in content filtering, then you must be morally opposed to using Google.

I contend that most people are not morally opposed to this -- they merely think they are. And further: that this is ok. But people would be better off admitting this than being selectively ignorant.

Google choosing to filter it's results for "tiananmen square" is not less bad than Apple choosing not to sell dictionaries that contain the term "cumdumpster" in the store that it operates. And yet people in the U.S. are prefer to engage in moral outrage over the latter. This is fucked up.

Apple, on the other hand, seems to delight in meddling in my business.

Apple is choosing to require content ratings in order to access the market of people who care about content ratings. There is no evidence anywhere that Apple's content restrictions are in place for any reason other than market pressure to conform to the same moderate standards that most of our culture does. (That is: saying they "delight" is a stretch). That you personally do not conform to those standards says nothing about whether Apple, a profit-seeking company, should do so. Also, I would point out that it is not your business being meddled with--Apple does not censor your content at all (and indeed, they did not censor Ninjawords' content). It is Apple's business. They operate a store and they choose what they are willing to sell in it.
I think it's amazing that Django and Rails are rated higher than PHP (at least, they are at the time I'm writing this).

This really exposes how different this crowd is from the mainstream.
It all boils down to the fact that you get what you pay for.
I think rjurney was being facetious; if the study was about the health benefits of cheese, he might've picked Doritoes as his example. :)
Should Programming Work be Billed in Hours?
The Londoner is at the corner of Sukhumvit 33. Easy to get to. The Bull's Head is down Suk 33/1, very easy to get to by BTS. The Phrom Phong station exit is just in front of the mouth of the soi.

I don't know where the Langsuang Starbucks is, never been there.
Just don't abandon old friends when you make new ones!
Where is it announced? In particular, how does one find out where / when it is to show up?
I'm surprised by Django's popularity.
My advice: sell your content, but not to the people who'll read it.

That's what newspapers have been doing for years -- the price you pay at the newsstand is nowhere close to covering what it costs to produce the actual bundle of printed paper you get. The problem, of course, is that too many companies still think they have to produce and distribute a printed bundle of paper, and so are getting their clocks cleaned by people who don't have all that overhead.
In that I knew it was gaining ground - but it's ahead of Rails in the poll right now. Didn't realize how far it has come.
Wha...? Wait a second. The title for the link submitted is: Vitamin D slashes risk of cancers by 77 percent (2007)

If what you're saying is true, that calcium + vitamin D confers the greatest benefit, then the link title is still wrong. But what in the study says that calcium + vitamin D conveys the greatest benefit? (ie Vitamin D alone wouldn't convey as great a benefit) It may be true, but it's not obvious from the article that was linked, and it's still not obvious from the original paper that you linked to.

The article and you are assuming that what is having the anti-cancer effect is the calcium, and the vitamin D helps you absorb the calcium, thus enhancing that effect.

First, I don't assume what you do, which is that supplementing calcium is always a positive. Second, what if vitamin D has some action other than help you absorb calcium. Even if I'm not an expert in this, I find it hard to believe that medical researchers have completely precluded vitamin D from having any action other than help your body absorb calcium, and if it alone helped prevent cancer, it may be really nice to know, especially if you don't want to be increasing your calcium.

I don't get the attitude. I was talking about the information was provided by the article. There may very well be a study about men 20-40 years old, of varying ethnic backgrounds, who take just vitamin D (no calcium) and it's found to decrease cancer versus control, but that's not the information provided here by the article or the original study.

Your point about actual vitamin D supplements on the market mostly coming with calcium suffers from the same logical problem. The article headline (original or on HN) should tell me what exactly is decreasing the cancer risk, not some assumption about what consumers will end up buying and what they'll likely also end up supplementing with additionally. If the conclusion had been vitamin D alone decreases the risk of cancer, do you think there wouldn't be manufacturers churning out pure vitamin D, without the calcium?

EDIT: Okay, parent has updated post. I appreciate that you softened your tone. Sure, I know it says that they aren't sure of the generality of the study in the article. I think it's worth pointing out because again, there's that disconnect between the title and the content. Title says "TAKE VITAMIN D" without qualification. Article says different.

Responding to your new point about the generality of the study--if the requirements for men and women really are the same (I don't buy it), then why study post-menopausal white women in Nebraska? I can see age for the cancer risk, but why not men, and why not of different ethnicities? If you're going to tell me that post-menopausal white women 55 and older are more likely to be deficient in calcium and vitamin D, then well, maybe the effects are exaggerated and other groups don't need the supplementation.

PS Computational biology is cool, I did programming work in a bio lab trying to identify splicing sites back in undergrad.
Apple has yet to censor anything. They have only rejected certain things from being sold in their store. If you think that is censorship then you must think that virtually every retailer in the world also stands for censorship.
Taking Online Paid Surveys - The Best Way to Make Money Each Day in Your PJ's
Ask HN: JSON or XML, questions about an idea ?
For a brand new API, which would you choose and why ?

I'm busy building a small social network, it will have an API as its main component, in fact most of the site itself will be built using the API.

If you have experience with both these techniques which do you think is the best way to go.

Eventually the API will be made public, power users will be able to write plug-ins for the site in javascript using a 'development' field in their profiles, these will be loaded after the 'default' code for the site loads and should enable the developers to modify the way the site works as much as possible.

Once a user has tested a plug in on their own account and has verified that it works properly they can submit it for general availability after an inspection to make sure that they are not doing anything nasty.

The resulting plug-in is then 'versioned' (cloned and given unique id) and made available to other users.

All the code will be served up by our server, so unlike facebook or other heavyweight APIs there will be no external servers involved (for now at least, who knows where this will lead...).

Has something like this been done already ?

Thanks for any and all information :)
Not really for me, if netbooks were cheap, but only come in 15", I wouldn't bother with one. They'd be a very cheap underpowered laptop.

Price obviously plays a part. Before netbooks, there were mini laptops that looked pretty much the same, but they were more expensive than laptops. Which made little sense.
Polymath4 (”Finding Primes”) now officially active « What’s new
I think you greatly exaggerate the taboo here. I've spoken with men and women about issues of gender inequality. Men and women are not identical, there are situations when they should not be treated the same. I think it's a shame people incorrectly treat them the same because of fear of being labelled sexist where there are generally differences in behavioural preferences between men and women, most obviously when you observe body language.

There are very reliable statistics that show pay discrepancies in the favour of men. For discussion of that to be taboo would be very bad.
you are still affected by Apple's anti-competitive iTunes dance.

Nonsense. Apple does nothing to prevent the Palm Pre from syncing with an iTunes library. They only prevent the Palm Pre from using iTunes to do so.
And it there is substantial evidence that it (red meat) increases the risk of cancer.
If HN even had a 5% female ratio I'd be surprised.
Well anyway I think a good and safe rule is: take a lot of sun, but avoid the "bad hours" (11:30-16:00 range in Italy, more or less) where it's simply too strong and will likely hurt.
Ask HN: Help with this 301 redirect?
Poll: Do You Have A Problem With This Statement
I was IM-ing with a friend after coming home tonight and we got into a heated debate about Apple’s app store banning (a story I’m sure every HN reader is aware of at this point). I said the Government should intervene and he said that was the beginning of the end because Government shouldn’t be allowed to tell companies what to do. I countered that point with this…

I believe Government should be allowed to force companies to define how they will act but not force companies to take any specific action.

In other words I believe the government should force Apple to define their acceptance criteria for the App store (e.g. give the specific reasons why apps would be rejected) in the same way they force food manufacturers to list their ingredients on the packaging. Is that something you would you have a problem with?
if you see A and B together it can be because C is causing both of them, not because A causes B or vice versa.
The Million dollar speaker - would you spend 5 Million for Surround-sound?
The thing about Django is Python, really. Ruby looks nice, but Python apps get the benefit of all the non-Django applications it's been put to: fast numerics through Numpy and Scipy, PIL, lxml, NLTK, Twisted, etc etc etc.

Of course, you could argue that Perl has even richer libraries, so...
The final question is a bit confusing! (at least it is to me...)
cell phones, aluminum cans, diabetes.
mod_rewrite will do this for you without any work on your part.

Simply move your data and set up mod_rewrite to allow access to the data in its old location.

You can 301 it but there are all sorts of pitfalls to avoid there. (not sure how much traffic you get from search engines but they tend to react badly to redirects if not done very carefully)
I'd edit it if you could tell me why it's confusing. I honestly can't see what you're talking about.
I think the reason the parent poster rendered that opinion has to do with the calculus - real or imagined - that stands behind Apple's particular choice of things to reject, and the common attributes that unite the sort of thing they tend to reject. Or, at least, the stuff that's made the headlines lately. It seems to have to do with things that allow you to use their devices more "freely" and/or do more and/or access more.

I don't think "censorship" is quite the correct term for that, but you can see where the idea arises that Apple is not just acting as a retailer that wants to sell certain products and not others in its store, but specifically wants to limit products that have to do with openness of information and freedom of use.

Whether you agree with that assessment or not, that's what drives people to use terms like "censorship" to describe it.
much better already! Interesting question by the way.

Full disclosure of terms is a must I think, and a very rigorous process should be in place to handle these situations.

I firmly believe that even though the app store is clearly apples creation with great power comes great responsibility.

And when companies do not live up to their responsibilities (I think Apple has proven beyond reasonable doubt that they act in an arbitrary way) then they ought to be forced to do so.

People build their businesses on top of the Iphone app store ecosystem and they should have a reasonable expectation that their investment is not subject to some arbitrary action of Apple.

If Apple does not want that kind of oversight they have a simple solution available to them: Open up the app store for everybody and drop the review process other than to look for stuff that I would loosely class as 'malware'.

If your application is merely stupid, trivial or has been done a million times already that should not disqualify you. Even 'disgusting' stuff should be possible, who is apple to define what is disgusting and what is not.

As long as applications stay within the law there should be room for them in the App store, the only thing Apple could do to protect its brand in this respect is to categorize the applications or to cut the app store loose from the mother ship.

They're in a tight spot on this one, damned if they do and damned if they don't. The 'apple knows best' strategy is backfiring big time.
Sure, but in that case, we would tend to say something like, "created Mahalo" or "the man behind Mahalo," not "wrote" Mahalo.

Otherwise, yes, your rejoinder is very apt. We say things like, "France rejects US demands for airline passenger information" all the time, knowing full well that France could not collectively do that literally.
XML/JSON: Answer is both. If you've built it well then you can just switch a template.

Your plugin system sounds a bit like AppEngine.
I wonder if the results would have been different if the title had led with the word Rails instead of Django. I certainly clicked the link because my lizard brain saw Django and before I knew it here I was.
TwitterFreq - Graphs Your Tweets Based On When You Sent Them
XML - because it is easily parsable, both client-side and server-side.
I still think that's anti-competitive douchebaggery. iTunes has become the standard platform for organizing music, thanks to the success of the iPod. I think it has elevated to a position where Apple should have to tread carefully in anti-competitive waters.
These comments added nothing of value to the discussion. Asking why people voted a certain way is foolish at the very least because those whose voting so vexed you will have already moved on. The very people you demand answers from did not even hear the question. Everyone else is just annoyed.

The truth is that voting never makes much sense. In aggregate, people vote based on agreement or disagreement whether they "should" or not, and complaining about it is not going to change that. A post with a score of 50 could represent an intriguing and nuanced exploration of a topic just as easily as it could represent a strongly-worded yet vapid and utterly one-sided opinion. All that voting really tells you is that at least 49 people found it something about it emotionally moving enough to click a button before closing the tab.
Not sure I follow 100%.

I've got a drupal site configured so the groups have URLs like groupname.domain.com/

I'm using the subdomain module (http://drupal.org/project/subdomain) to create these "fake" subdomains.

For a few reasons, I want to move to a structure like this:

domain.com/groups/groupname

I can switch off the subdomain module and change the paths to my existing groups to take the desired format. But I need to redirect all traffic going to the old URLs to the new ones.

You're saying adding a Redirect to my htaccess isn't the best way to go? The guy over on stack overflow suggested a rule but it creates an infinite redirect loop.
The thing about SLAs is - as they are conventionally provided in the mainstream - that they're largely meaningless in terms of the provider's liabilities if the fail to honour the commitment.

Not only is the burden of proof on the user to show that the provider did not meet the committed information rate at a particular time, but you don't really get to collect anything.

Forget residential/consumer-grade broadband connections; even the business-class, "dedicated" connections like point-to-point leased circuits (e.g. T1s) that typically do come with SLAs don't give you much bang. A typical SLA about T1 uptime, for instance, will offer to credit the user by prorating their monthly rate proportionally to any downtime.

OK, so, I'm paying $400/mo for a T1 and it goes down for a whole day. 400 / 30 = $13.34. So, I get about $13 back. If I've got an office of 10 people I'm paying an average of $16/hr to work in an Internet-dependent way, we shall say conservatively, that means that I just paid $1280 for 10 people to sit on their butt, not to mention lost business and other arguable opportunity costs, etc, etc. In any event, it's obvious that $13 doesn't cover the business impact of the outage, even in a commonsensical sort of way.

No provider would take the risk of crediting you the entire rate - or even half - for a day's outage or something like that.

Besides, if you're dealing with anyone but the telco and/or cable MSO that actually owns and operates most of the facilities involved, the issues involved in circuit repair are so phenomenally out of the control of the ISP that the exposure would just be insane. And if you are dealing with the actual megacorp, their repair processes are so bureaucratised and slow that they wouldn't take the hit on the MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) either.
A tonne of companies would be providing that sort of service to restaurants and they would likely already have a head-start, industry contacts, etc. You'd want far more of a niche than that IMO.
JSON if you need SPEED at the client or server ends.
If speed isn't a major factor than XML may win out, depending on the complexity of the data your sending back. XML in large, hierarchies is going to be easier to read.
It's like that old joke, that the first telephone was the hardest sell (who ya gonna call?)

Joshua Schachter (delicious founder) said something about network effects that really struck me: make something that has network effects, but which is also useful and valuable even if no-one else is using it.

There's a related view that's applicable to my startup: make something that useful and valuable on its own, that can have additional network effects if others are using it.

BTW: I've searched for where Joshua said that, but I've not been able to find it (there were three points). Anyone know which interview I mean?
The infinite redirect loop means that your rule is buggy, but that is the way to go.

Probably you are matching too much.

with the information you gave above I see a much simpler way to solve this:

Set up your webserver (I'm assuming apache) to map www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com to one virtual host and .yourdomain.com to another.

Then do the .htaccess in the root of the virtualhost associated with .yourdomain.com

That way you can not make any infinite loops.

good luck!
Debunked LINQ Myths
I'd just come in in parachute pants, strummin', "Woke last night to tha sound uf thunda!!!"
Really? The authorities think pedobear hangs out at Bebo?

How strange...
"Market: People don't know what they want til they see it."

Ditto that. If people could figure out for themselves what would solve the issue they had, then they wouldn't need a start-up to provide it.

"Development: You don't know what problems your idea has (nor their solution) til you see it."

The military has some saying along the lines of "No battle plan survives the first engagement." And Bill Gates has said "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

For me, three years of talking to people online with little in the way of results has convinced me that there is a huge information gap and this is what I need to overcome. But no one could "tell" me that. I just had to figure out why I am getting such poor reception (and so much hostility) for a solution to a problem that everyone desperately wants fixed. The solution I offer doesn't fit with their concept of what a solution should look like and they can't wrap their brains around it. There are two types of people who are relatively more receptive. Both groups are intrinsically less accepting of current dogma than is typical.
My first question would be "what are you writing this social network in?" Because I think every mainstream language in existence has free libraries to create both XML and JSON output (Javascript is made for it, .Net has WCF, there are several Gems for Ruby, php has _encode, etc...). So implementing both should just be a matter of passing the values to the appropriate function and reaping the benefits of already available libraries.

That in mind I'd say both. If for some reason you insist on choosing I'd probably say JSON. XML's only real advantage over JSON, imho, is it's human readability. That makes it great for stuff like configuration files. But for machine to machine communication JSON is faster and less prone to conversion errors. Plus it's easier to accept JSON in Javascript which you defined as your target audience.