skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Judging by the fact that the registrant looks quite similar to the one used for the domain in your sig I'm guessing it worked :)
The socialite blog thing will die down.

All it takes is for all the herd to realize that there's not money in it, not the way they think, and the social currency you get by being in that crowd will disappear.
FWIW, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and medical care for soldiers are all pretty good on the US scale.

Ahoyhere's comment isn't the half of it. The incident happened at Walter Reed Army Hospital, which is the same place that US president's usually go for care. If stuff like that could happen there (it may have been a different branch in DC), what's the rest of the system going to be like?

I worked for a medical software company for seven years, converting Medicare specs for outpatient code editing into working programs. We would get regulatory updates once a quarter, make changes to the code and the data, test and ship. The fun part was that we would usually receive the reg changes 3 weeks before the hospitals had to have the updated application. Also, their reference application didn't match what was written in the specs. Worst of all, the spec changes were often unreadable and we would have to call DC to figure out what they meant. It will not surprise many of you to learn that they wouldn't know either and would "have to get back to us". I could go on and on...
This is an interesting idea. The obvious question is how do you measure activity -- this is one of the things that often causes disagreements (e.g. different cofounders all thinking that they contributed the most).
What Can You Learn From Breast Cancer
> 3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo

If you have to be encouraged to buck the status quo, you're not really bucking the status quo. You cannot be invited to be an iconoclast.
"Here we go: eight years of Linux kernels from 2.4 to 2.6 are vulnerable. That means, if you stumble along the wrong exploit code your safety is hosed. But thinking outside the security of your own computer, consider the millions of nodes out there that are running dangerously — and aren’t to be upgraded any time soon. And all this on our stone-stable Linux kernel?"

This is annoying. Yes, there is a critical bug out there, but it's a local privilege escalation exploit, which is completely different from a remote exploit.
Cloud computing events near Boston (recap of aug 13 event)
The product is extraordinary. I also think its awesome how in the face of them rolling out search on the platform, you upped the value game significantly.
OK, I'm not sure I agree with that in the general case either, but that still wouldn't be important to the proof. We can safely assume infinite tape and then the proof is fine.

If you think we must implement the turing machine in order for the proof to be believed, then you've only weakened the proof to "The static parsing behaviour of Perl is dependent on the length of tape available", which is basically just reducing the problem to a rather unhelpful interpretation of "deterministic behaviour", approximately equivalent to the example using randomisation (except you move the random element from the program under consideration to the environment in which it is being considered).

Am I missing why you think this is a significant point?
Carl Sagan's Cosmos (video)
On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever
How to obtain logins for websites which require registration
I think everyone should watch Cosmos at least once in a lifetime. A lot of people here in HN are relatively young (like me) and not everybody heard about it, so I'm spreading the word!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996)
Nokia 2760 Grey Unlocked
The modern Nokia 2760 is an elegant natural looking mobile phone which comes complete with user friendly features to keep the user entertained at all times. The phone comes in a variety of colours which enhance the natural look of the handset & provide the handset with a modern feel. The colours enhance the main sections of the phone including the clamshell opening screen section & the navigation tool. The keypad is smooth & stylish which comes in a natural cream colour which compliments the casing colours available.
I think that's making it sound a little more fragile than it actually is.

Within a system like Isabelle, the formalisation of each piece of the proof must remain relatively consistent with both the built-in proofs about fundamental mathematical structures, as well as the proofs that you have written.

I say "relatively consistent" because I don't have enough experience with the internals of Isabelle to say with certainty as to exactly how consistency is enforced. I know that types are enforced in a globally consistent way, for example.

That said, I have a high degree of confidence in the correctness of machine-checked proofs.

So I understand that your point is that you're taking some leaps of faith, and I agree to a point, but I think they are much more reasoned and considered leaps than you suggest.
Why is that weird? It's the "rocks in a box" scam.
> What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media?

Exactly. In that case a Wikipedia article would be appropriate (I thought that was clear in my post, sorry)

In the example of Jessica Livingston this page: http://ycombinator.com/people.html provides all of the information found on wikipedia.
Cause he tried to pass an oven door as a tv!
I would suggest you take a look at apparmor and selinux both of which can be used; and in recent ubuntu and redhat releases, are used extensively, to provide very fine grained access control capabilities.
Google earth for our social graph
Perhaps, but that would be unfortunate. When I get together with my friends, we can discuss whatever we want without needing to worry that the very choice of topic might lead to the group being diluted and eventually poisoned.

Personally I am not convinced what happened to Reddit and Slashdot etc would happen here anyway. It is quite possible that Reddit has accomodated all the people who wanted a current-style Reddit and they are all happy where they are. There is a finite number of people, after all, despite how it sometimes seems.

The people arguing against political topics here, based upon the experience at Reddit, do so referring to a single data point in a highly complex environment. I am far from convinced the argument is valid at all. Sure, discourage puns in comments and [PIC] links, couldn't agree more. But I am not sure forbidding whole topics as a rule is a good idea. Plenty of smart hackers are also interested in politics, and they might not be interested in participating in multiple discussion sites. If HN limits itself too much, they might get bored and leave.

Anyway, just my speculation on an interesting topic, not trying to mount a formal argument or anything.
There was an Spanish-language project for these things called: "Proyecto Lalala" (Lalala project) which encourage users to register accounts with 'lalala' as user and passwords in every crappy website that required user registration and avoid frustration to other users.

Then, if you only need a quick auth to get some info, you just logged in with 'lalala' (or create the user if it wasn't created)
Mildly unethical at the very least, in breach of terms and conditions in the average case, criminal in the worst case (depending on the laws of your country around unauthorised access to computer systems).

This isn't a specific criticism of this site, as such, but rather on all such sites that try to save people time by providing generic logins.

Not that you shouldn't do it. It's just worth thinking about, y'know?
Goodbye, Hedge Fund; Hello, Touch Revolution
I wouldn't view pragmatism as an extreme. If you're truly pragmatic, you have a guiding philosophy, but aren't fanatical about it. I think it's a good middle ground.
When I saw this was a top story, for a second, I thought I was on digg.
It's not a book (yet) but it's a blog http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
a delicious blog indeed.
This is healthy, better competition on the browser market should result in the platform becoming solid. I'm hoping we don't see the fragmentation that we saw in the OS market. This time round it looks more like a race: at least while the standards are ahead.

Isn't this a little like Active Desktop meets flock?
Ah, you're talking about lifetime costs. I was thinking in terms of per-incident.

You also seem to be thinking in terms of end-stage "keep them alive vs. let them die" issues. I was thinking more along the lines of toothaches, infected cuts, etc. Yes, it does get more complex - both medically and morally - as the patient gets older.

I'll agree with you on the "hellishly complicated" part though. The politics of elderly care are a moral minefield.
Google's Varian: Search scale is 'bogus'
cough bugmenot.com cough
Cloning Vi Using Haskell
Why simple XML processing is so painful in Java ?
24 hour business camp. 28-30 October, Stockholm, Sweden.
Apple’s Cash Hoard
The Definitive Guide to GET vs POST
IMO being a hacker has nothing to do with computers. Also, I'm amazed that people here are still making the mistake of conflating crackers - those who make unauthorised access to [computer] systems - with hackers. Presumably you think you're breaking the law by coming on "Hacker News"?
Try Clojure:

http://clojure.org/api#toc673
I think that's a good idea for a type of small email group. If anyone ever wants to talk ideas to a small group, you can send me or mahmud an email. Also, Mahmud, you can pitch directly to Hacker News. Just make a link to your executive summary or slide deck or whatever you have. Multiple companies have raised money this way, though it may be a little harder with the world economy collapsing around us.
He had a different idea than yours. There is no need for a mailing list for the community to hang out. It sounds like something that doesn't work as well as Hacker News.

Most of these ideas for external groups didn't really go anywhere. The Friendfeed one did have a fair amount of activity, but they changed the name eventually.
The Microsoft File
Found this while going back in time courtesy of Wired :)
I knew the older iPhones couldn't send MMS, but I had thought that the new one could because they keep saying "Send and receive pictures and videos" in relation to the iphone up here in Canada.
That's what the ice bath shock is for-- it firms the skin back up again. The skin and fat is the good stuff :)

This is one of the national dishes of Singapore, btw. There are hawker stands that have been recycling the broth for decades into a super-intense brew.
I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system
How is this different to bugmenot? In fact, Bugmenot is easier to use because you can use the firefox extension to fill in the username/password fields.
Michael Ruhlman - The Elements of Cooking

http://books.google.com/books?id=iX55tiQfXIgC&lpg=PP1...

Michael Ruhlman - Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

http://books.google.com/books?id=zGaRpi4YdIQC&lpg=PP1...
A Sad Day. Goodbye, Riya
Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
Python vs. Lisp
Some suggestions: cut a lemon in half, squeeze juice over bird, shove what's left inside the bird. Also put some fresh thyme/rosemary in there.

Put those frozen veg in the bottom of the chicken pan (helps to use a 13x9x2 here). They will poach in the chicken fat and taste glorious. (salt and pepper those too)

Advanced: shove some butter under the skin of the bird, and smear some on top too.
I think not all use their firefox extension. Here I like the cleaner interface
1. Go to chinatown

2. Find the busiest dumpling shop (chowhound will help)

3. Buy a bag of frozen dumplings. Buy two.

4. Buy some "chunkiang" vinegar while you're in the neighborhood.

5. Boil water.

6. Put frozen dumplings in water. Stir for a minute so they don't stick to the pot.

7. When the water boils again, set a timer for 8 mins (depends on the size of the dumpling)

9. Drain and serve with a little bowl of the vinegar.
And not all users use FireFox :)
This is quite dated, but I found it interesting. I also wonder how such a comparison done today would fare for both languages.
btw0 posted the original article.
Cratered your Linux Box? Here are some helpful tips.
When I was that age, I really liked the "Mike Mars" series of books by Donald A. Wollheim.
There is no problem for webmasters to find and delete 'lalala' accounts
In the post, noname123 says "hacker," but the areas of endeavor he's discussing cross that boundary. More importantly, the activities he talks about were always restricted to small, secretive communities--I had no idea that stuff was going on 'til the early 90s.

And guess what? The original set of activities, with the original motivation, is still going on in small, secretive communities. It's just hard to tell when your particular community dissolved long ago, and you haven't run across any others in a very obvious way.
As it's a series of articles going through the various World of Goo-versions they had before the final, there's no need to go throug TIGSource, just go directly to 2DBoy.com. More specifically http://2dboy.com/category/world-of-goo/page/2/ for the beginning of the series.
Can you elaborate on the ethical aspect? My first reaction is to favor anonymizing services but I would like to understand both sides of the issue.
You're right, I messed that up when moving the domain. Fixed now. (Yes, the site is very silly.)
hacking != cracking
Don't waste too much time poring over every detail of these books, though. You'll never learn it all just by reading. Get the basic ideas and then start applying them as soon as you can.
Good points about automating the processes which surround your cloud, but I don’t think the author takes it far enough.

To get the most from cloud computing I am hoping we see cross cloud automation. With sufficient metadata surrounding the both the inputs/outputs and the preconditions/effects of processes in a cloud, it should be possible to discover a service, understand what it does, then make use of it without additional development.

I won’t go far as to say this means these steps are fully automated, but I think with some automated support, this process is seconds or minutes, not hours or days.
I'll second that. I purchased one of Red Gate's flagship products (ANTS Profiler) about a year ago to use on one of my last projects for school (a .NET-based numerical library), and I remember thinking that they were the first company that had ever made me think, "Their customer service is so good, I'll definitely buy something from them again."
How many of you are musical?
I watched a PBS special last night that looked at how music is ingrained in the human experience, and how our taste for music is mathematically integrated with the physics of music. Made me wonder: How many hackers play an instrument or are otherwise musically inclined? Please vote up a choice and post what, if any, instrument(s) you play.
I play one instrument
I play multiple instruments
I play in a band/sing in a choir
I sing in the shower
This guy is right on. We are quickly reaching a point in time where Web apps will be the only ones that matter. And that will be because web apps will be the only ones any customers will want to use.
I would like to learn to play an instrument/sing
I do not play an instrument or sing
just wondering about pros and cons of offering founder's stock to early seed investors? I know few incubators/investors asking for the same ....
If the tape is finite then there are a finite number of states. In which case a halting oracle can exist - it detects repeated states.

I can't see how we can assume an infinite tape exists - there has never been such an implementation, nor is it easy to see how this might be achieved.

The weakened proof only proves that a static parse could be possible if we give the parser enough tape. The size of tape for the parser is determined by the size of tape the perl program is allowed.

I'm afraid I don't understand your statements about deterministic behaviour or randomisation.
Satellite-based estimates of groundwater depletion in India
Also related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746708
Would love to pull you guys into socialgreat.com - when/where's the api?
oh, sorry. I couldnt figure what gp meant :)
The Crucible Effect and the Scarcity of Collective Attention
I wonder if Google could cook up some sort of IE6 support? (Or just open IE6 as an ActiveX in Chrome browser tabs?)
I myself participated in the hacking cult noname123 refers to and i can clearly understand his statement.
If you haven't been there, you just can't get it.

"Get a `blog'" haha this is so freaking hilarious and irritating at the same time .. clueless people that have only recently started using computers.

IT today is all about a bunch of business morons abusing
the poor text-based HTTP protocol, reinventing user interfaces rendered through an overloaded browser process.
An enormous number of levels of abstraction just to display a single facebook button.

They insist on pushing it even further .. every single f day .. polluting the field with buzzwords, overaplying relational databases where they are actually completely useless!
It's all about making simple things look complex, as more and more clueless people get involved in the IT "business".

Thank god we still have OpenBSD and Plan9 and the old phrack articles around.

PS: address space randomization is a lame-ass countermeasure.
I think I subconsciously had the same opinion as Michael, but reading it out loud makes you consider how dumb the idea really is. Do I think python developers are stupid just because it's easier to program in than C? No of course not. Elitism is rarely justified based on the tools or platforms people use.
Fixing e-mail on the iPhone: a review of reMail and GPush
Look at the end of that url. The "/page/2/" means it's currently on the 2nd page of their blog.

As they post new items it will eventually slip out of page 2, and that url will not be as useful in a few weeks/months/years as the tigsource page.
I, for one, get really annoyed with our "lol web programmers are teh suxxors" overlords.

As it turns out, Jeff says exactly what I'm thinking. I _am_ into compilers. I'm writing an OS as a side project. I code in Haskell for fun. But I love web programming, and these two quotes are the most succinct way I've seen it written:

> The web is the most efficient, most pervasive, most immediate distribution network for software ever created.

> As a software developer, I am happiest writing software that gets used.

As Jeff says, yeah, there's a lot of bad web apps. But there are also a lot of bad desktop apps. The "web programmers suck" crowd seems to ignore that fun little fact.
In Quest of Open Source Load- and Stress-Testing Tools
Point-Counterpoint - Should employees be loyal to their employers?
Ask HN: Bad habits
What are your bad habits? Did you overcome them? If so, how? If not, why?
Oh kid... You got it completely backwards...
Looks very promising, first I have seen of it. Seems to be missing import and export though currently?
Also, like qwerty!
HN. No. Because there is just too much good stuff here and too little time in a day.

The 'noprocrast' is great, and I use it occasionally but then you see that google has a new beta out or that friendfeed gets bought and it gets disabled again...
I think Jeff's post lacks humility and perspective. Generally you try not to name laws after yourself, but let's say it was some sort of humour.

I truly think he should put web programming aside for a while, and realize someone has got to write the operating systems, web servers, middle wares, compilers, tools that make everything possible.

If things are simple it's because other people solved the hard problems for him, and sorry, but it's more challenging and requires some "traits" not found in every engineer.

Of course writing a complex, working and reliable web application is far from trivial, but please, realize that the world is rich and vast and there is always a bigger mountain out there.
The problems that can happen with a webapp:

* your account gets compromised, your password is saved in plaintext, etc...

* their servers are down, you want to work on a Word doc, edit an image. To bad, you can't because the app itself is down

* not everybody has constant internet connectivity.

* Webapps can never be as powerful as a desktop application.
This duality I find annoying - I want to be able to upvote with reasoning, even if there are just two vote types "Yes/No" and "Up/Down". Then I can show agreement or show that someone added to the thread but didn't say something I agree with.
PS
Here's the link to the HN meetup group in DC:
http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/
Gene Therapy Creates a New Fovea
Ironically, this guy doesn't understand that the stimulus spending is the only thing that has stopped the economy doing what happened in 1930, when a real depression happened. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/a-dark-age-of-ma...
Also nice Vim-ish editor in Haskell: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi
Hear Hear !
Once technologies like Google's Native Client take off, the web browser becomes merely the installer and updater for my native app.

And it'll be none too soon -- then we can abandon the doomed effort to somehow cobble together huge, powerful apps like Maya and Photoshop out of a mess of JavaScript and XML.
I love the "I like using tools like this because they are hard and it makes me feel smarter than everyone else" attitude. I understand everything on the little laundry list, including things I wish I'd never had to do (UML diagrams, for instance), but choose to work on the web. Why? Because I prefer my "hard problems" to be customer problems, not technical ones. I'm happy to work on hard technical problems when products require it, but there's plenty of difficulty just figuring out what people want and how to get it to them quickly. There's no glory in doing hard things for the sake of it. I don't need to purposely handicap myself just to prove that I'm smarter than other people.

I'm fully confident in my intelligence without playing stupid games.
I don't get it either. Bugmenot already has significant mindshare among people who would actually care about / use such a site.

They've decided to fight an uphill battle against an entrenched competitor, who offers an identical service. And aside from a slightly cleaner "professional white" interface, they don't seem to offer anything that Bugmenot doesn't. And BMN has a neat FF plugin, if you want to use it.

Color me confused. They need some compelling features to get users to change, and I'm not seeing any so far.
Absolutely. AR is probably the hottest thing now in the valley riding on CrashCorp, etc. So will AR be useful as a new way to find reviews and restaurants, who knows. Time will time.
Ask HN: Ruby on Rails or PHP ?
I am quite a newbie in web development world. My friends and myself are planning to write a new web-app (as a side-work). We have a little experience in PHP and heard and read a lot about Ruby on Rails.
What do you gys suggest RoR or PHP(with a framework like symfony or cakePHP) ?
Our priorities are :
1. Quick development time.
2. Hassle free development and deployment.
3. cool-looking UI.
4. lower learning curve.

Thanks,
Vineet