skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This blog is yet another reason why editors play a crucial role in weeding out crap articles. So scientists aren't the ideal protagonist in every story. Tell me something I don't know.
Of course markets aren't perfect. They can cope with distortions like the mortgage tax deduction but the cost is reduced efficiency and resiliency. The mortgage tax deduction didn't trigger the crisis but it amplified the effects by increasing the number and size of mortgages.

(BTW, I'd like to clarify that I didn't downvote you and I agree it was uncalled for. I don't yet have the ability to downvote.)
Starbucks is a 'coffee shop' in the same way McDonalds is a 'resturant'.
The fruits of the feminist revolution: eight hours a day in a cubicle.
This is decentralized. Someone could try to centralize it (see: the large number of large OpenID providers that aren't consumers), but starting out with something that decentralized means it's an uphill battle for the centralizers to do anything evil with the centralization. Who deploys it and who doesn't will depend on who decides it's a net benefit.
I am no physicist and would appreciate if somebody can explain why the speed of light is used everywhere in physics, specially in that E=mc2 formula.

This is a consequence of the invariance of the speed of light. You can pretty much derive Lorentz transformations (and a large chunk of special relativity) by simply forcing the speed of light to always be the same regardless of how fast you are moving with respect to the light source. (For a sketch see http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~ljc/voigt02.jpg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#From_phy... for a more detailed example).

A direct consequence of the form of the transformation factor \beta=1/(sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) is that you can't go over the speed of light without getting all sorts of imaginary (as in non physical) quantities.
Google Wave Preview Opens to the Public on September 30th
So basically to be uber geeky you should start espousing e=mc2 + mv2/2?
Switched from Subversion to Git
woot!! that is awesome.
I am so eager to give it a try. I love gmail and am on it 24/7 (ok, almost).
I really have to call you on this one. Usually I would just let it go, but really, this has just missed the mark. You're suggesting that the presence of certain keywords in a question permit you to totally rephrase that question and then answer that instead?

I'll quote from the post:

> The author discusses choosing the "best language for the task." That is something I see discussed quite frequently. I know there are languages that are most commonly used for certain tasks, but how do you decide between two similar languages?

That was the question being asked.
Care to say why?
The "ownership" isn't what it used to be - you have to pay property taxes, and if you don't you will be kicked out of "your home". In effect you are renting your home from the government.
If I can't use it as a programmer's workstation as well as a simplified desktop, its of no use to me. I realize their target audience may be thin consumer devices, but if they want good stuff dev'd on it, developers need to work directly on it as well. Time will tell.
Or something like this, even http://www2.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP20811972138108...

(From http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Series[%28m0*c^2%29%2FS...] )
It should be pointed out that while the article sort of munged this point, it is a particular math problem in game theory that, like other game theory problems, has applications of interest well beyond what the problem is "about", whereas it's actually useless in the real world. (How often does Prisoner's Dilemma actually come up for you?) So, if it sounds like an unreasonable assumption that there is a universal fitness function, well, sure. It's a math problem, not a real description of real life. 100 potential partners isn't terribly realistic either. It's either much lower ("the set of people I have dated") or much higher ("the set of all people I have ever met that might be a suitable candidate", and remember, in the face of "love at first sight" that's a very large set for most people, well into the thousands).

I find it sort of annoying when people propagate that error, but meh, whatever.
Tell HN: The 2 best things I love about HN
1) No ads
2) The wealth of FILTERED information you get everyday without browsing any other website

I used to waste so much time on techcrunch, venturebeat, techmeme, slashdot, google news, mashable, engadget and the likes. But, thanks to HN, not anymore. :)
>I do not believe they were married.
Lol!
ASP.NET disk-based caching
So how about those who weren't? "Let god sort them out", or what?
that will be HTTP/1.3
Claude Shannon and the making of information theory (2003)
I tend to keep my display dim enough that all it could really do is turn it off. It might as well just close the tab at that point. :)
I also like the implication that scientists (you know, that wonderfully cohesive and homogeneous group of people who all share an agenda and a single world view) have nothing better to do than attempting to take over Hollywood's movie production.

If anything, I think most of the bad science (as described in the comments of the article) comes from not talking to real scientists enough.

Good (or bad) recent example: "Knowing", where Nicholas Cage manages to play a scientist without resembling a scientist in any way, shape or form, as though nobody involved with the production had ever met a real, live scientist before.
From personal experience, I would absolutely say that a huge component of "desire" can be eliminated by a low glycemic diet (this is orthogonal to depression, I cannot speak to that).

The blood sugar/insulin "roller coaster" can be avoided: rises in blood sugar stimulate an insulin response, insulin is released to move the glucose, but eventually this causes a dip which triggers (somewhat misleading) hunger pangs. The trick is to get this to happen as little/gently as possible and those pangs go away.

I do it every day and I've lost weight for the past ~20 weeks without being hungry. No willpower is required, just consistency (and taking a great interest in it all...).
Tap4Help
If you brake really hard, you're probably going to decelerate at around 7 m/s2.

25 MPH / 7 m/s2 ~= 1.6 seconds.

If you get caught running a redlight, you went through the intersection > 0.5 seconds after the light turned red, which is at least > 4 seconds after the light turned amber.

If you can't stop safely in that time, you weren't driving safely, or there were exceptional circumstances (eg. an ambulance, or a tailgating semi-trailer). The video footage of the event will exonerate you in those circumstances.

The total number of accidents increase, but the number of severe accidents decrease.

I love seeing people running red lights getting flashed. It makes my day.
I also am no physicist, but I've read a bunch of books!

Picking 'the speed of light in a vacuum' does seem to be fairly arbitrary, almost as if physicists had decided to write equations in terms of 'the top speed of a stock 1972 Dodge Viper', but as I understand it, light really does have a special place in the scheme of the universe. Newton's laws are an excellent description of the way the universe works at the scales humans work with, but with extremes of mass, energy or velocity Newton's laws break down.

Einstein's theories have a number of consequences that seem strange to our limited human experience; things like time running slower for things moving at an appreciable proportion of c, the mass of fast-moving objects approaching inifinity as their velocity approaches c, and time running lower in the vicinity of very large masses. Despite how strange these predictions sound, they seem to match our observations of the world around us - for example, one of Einstein's early triumphs was that he was able to accurately predict the orbit of Mercury (deep within the Sun's enormous gravitational field) when Newton's laws could never get it quite right.

As for 'why light specifically', well, it isn't exactly - it's the speed of all electromagnetic radiation. Of the four fundamental forces in the universe, half (strong and weak nuclear forces) only work on atomic scales, and gravity works by its own special rules, leaving electromagnetism as pretty fundamentally important.
His autobiography, incidentally, is one of the finest I've read. Even those with no interest in history will find it enjoyable.
So assuming half the population of the world are female, that would give me 3388940742. let's say 20% of them are single (no clue, arbitrary guess), that would give a pool of 677788148 potential partners. Now probably 50% of those are within my acceptable age range. So to get a 37% chance of finding the "best" one in the world, I'd have to date 125516323 women and then choose the next best one (which would take longer since I already have a pretty large pool of exes).
I have to say, it is quite bizarre, watching the US health "debate" from up here in Canada.

At the end of the day, it's a philosophical difference. I see people in Sicko, or read any of the thousands upon thousands of horror stories (like the ones in the article) and my stomach turns. I find situations like that downright amoral, so I think having to pay higher taxes for UHC is great value.

OTOH, opponents look at the same people and start to get mad that these people should get "something for nothing", that their tax dollars are used to help people that may have made bad choices.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think this will turn out well for you guys. Any bill that is passed will be very watered-down and if the republicans get back into power before American UHC gets ingrained in the social fabric, then they'll do their best to kill it or cripple it.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764433
Remember too that Franklin lived about 100 years before Daylight Savings Time, not to mention however long before household electricity was common. Getting to sleep at 10 was probably easier when it was too dark to do anything.
No. It's a valid URL. Why would we require a new protocol version?
a cheeky name for "god"... basically he wanted to pray, but felt silly saying 'God' so he came up with something he thought sounded more rational
I think for domain-specific languages, visual programming makes perfect sense if the domain lends itself to visual representation.

I guess the interesting question is whether we can even begin to approach generality.
I would add

3) generally very thoughtful discussion in the comments.
Fatty Foods Affect Memory and Exercise
Free healthcare will never survive one fact: The fact that scarcity exists.

The fact that healthcare are so expensive in America are numerous. The limited supply of doctors due to medical cartels, patents on drugs, overusage of the system by medicaid users, insurance companies being used for paying everyday medical cost, and more.

But in Canada and other places where social medicine or universial health care exists, there has been rationing of improtant services. It is also where capital structures simply rot.

I believe wealthy nations' medical system are going to crash and burn decades from now because government deemed healthcare too improtant to regulate or control, never mind the consquences of unintended effects from regulations.

The only solution is to return control of the healthcare to individuals, which are embodied in a free market. Only individuals have any chance to find a solution where centralized regulatory power and decision makers fails miserably.
Fines levied against anyone/any corporation ought to go into a fund that is divided up in some manner independent of any individual jurisdiction's propensity to levy them. The problem with allowing a municipality to enforce laws and then profit from that enforcement is the obvious incentive to optimize on revenue instead of the public good.

Let's pretend that all fines from red light cameras had to be divided up among 100 municipalities. The free rider "problem" would kick in. Why bother to purchase expensive cameras when you only see on cent per dollar in fines? Only at the most problematic intersection would one find such devices.

I would believe claims that law enforcement was for the public good if those entities doing the enforcing did not profit significantly from their propensity to enforce.
How about associating each individual with a unique number and creating a universal identity database controlled by individuals (to protect private data) and not by any corporation?

http://humanidproject.blogspot.com/
Yes, I did read the post. Haven't had to try to use it (because of a colleague's specification of WordPress for one site for one of my organizations), I'm not convinced that WordPress is built on the right base of fundamental design choices to meet those needs. In other words, I think WordPress is a kluge. A different webmaster of another website I am closely familiar with uses completely different tools to do what WordPress supposedly does, and finds his site much easier to run as an administrator and much easier for contributing users as co-authors.
HN loads extremely quickly. I can generally scan through a page of comments quicker than the linked article while their rendering is blocked on 3rd party scripts/ads
For me its:

1) Subject Matter of the articles.
for the most part the articles on here are right on target in what I am interested in.I know lately there has been talk of some cruft getting through, but for the most part the quality of articles to make it to front page is high.

2) Community
I find that the community here is respectful and the members tend(and their comments) to be quite knowledgeable and highly focused. The community in general is a positive one.
"... but if they want good stuff dev'd on it"

I think this completely misses the point. Applications are web apps. You're not supposed to dev for the OS.

Edit: formatting
My experiences of the New Zealand health system and the NHS in Britain have been nothing but positive.

What's all this talk of crashing and burning?

Really, the free market and the individual as the fundamental unit of society rarely act in the best interests of the society as a whole. That's why many governments provide centralised healthcare. They can essentially take all the money (as taxes) that would have been spent on health care or insurance in a given year, and use it to build hospitals and medical facilities that the public own. The public then gets to use these facilities that they paid for at no cost, or at a heavily subsidised rate. If more people need more health care, taxes go up, and more hospitals are built.

It's a surprisingly efficient way of doing things. Much more so than having lots of private companies, each with shareholders demanding profits be returned on top of something as basic as healthcare.
Best Practices for Database indexes
holy expletive! Wolfram alpha can solve equations, show steps, and graph it? Wow I knew it could tell me the population of the world and stuff but didn't know it could do my math homework too. Screw maxima.
It's so smart! http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+stupid%3F
Fear as in the flip-side of awe: the realization as to how insignificant you are, on some level.
It's never been easy to have your cake and eat it too.
Medicaid users overuse the system because of unintended consequences of medicaid regulations. In order to continue being eligible for medicaid you have to prove that you have serious medical conditions. What would you do? It's simple game theory. From anecdotal evidence I can say that Medicaid costs could probably be reduced by a factor of ten if people weren't forced to participate in fraud.
that's a great idea... i rarely need something like that, but there seem to be weeks now and then when it would be quite useful...
1. Interesting content.

2. Good quality, helpful, useful comments with very few idiots.
What do you think about adding "good" to those questions? Was that a linguistical/cultural thing back then to mean 'meaningful' in reference to himself, or did it mean 'good' as in The Public Good?
My theory is that programmers choose to use languages like Python and Ruby for their personal projects, despite their weaknesses, because these languages are more fun to program in.

There's something about this thinking that gets me on the defensive. I think it's that so many people seem to unquestionly accept that C# and Java are for real work, but that Ruby and Python are somehow lesser languages.

I work in the IT dept of a small but conservative company, in a large but conservative field. A few years ago, before I came onboard, they made the decision to phase out Java for Ruby, and now almost all work is Ruby. We've also migrated development environments from Windows to Linux.

I'd consider myself a professional programmer, but this is my first job in a Ruby shop, and I have to say I am still staggered by the productivity. We do things with our small team that would never be considered amongst larger teams I've worked for.

Strange thing is, we don't fit any of the Ruby/Rails stereotypes at all; average age of the devs would be mid-30s and we all have kids. Oh, and only one of us owns a Mac.
Jon Udell once reminded me that scientists are people. In other words some percentage of people are good storytellers and similarly for scientists. We've all been guilty of gross generalizations but one would hope Discover would do better.
Google Insights: Standardized Test Searches Around the World
for those who hear only hype and fluff about google wave taking over the world. here is something factual: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
Ask HN: Web programming for a C++ server developer?
I've been programming low-latency, high throughput C++ systems for more than 5 years now, but I wanted to try my hand at some simple web development. Compared to 5-10 years ago (I'm 26 and haven't programmed for the web in a while), the sheer number of frameworks and add-ons to those frameworks is a bit overwhelming.

I've started to implement my site using Django as I'm a moderately proficient Python programmer but would be open to switching to another framework for a compelling reason. Also, where can I find resources to learn the more client facing stuff (AJAX, CSS, basic layout and design, etc)?

As an aside, has anyone else been through this before (i.e. much more comfortable with back end work but want to implement an idea you've had)? What did you do in that situation?
This is the #1 for me. There are other ways to filter content and block ads, but finding quality conversations is difficult.
Given, we are talking about Ben Franklin, I would be more inclined towards The Public Good rather than "meaningful" in reference to himself. And that is the reason I avoid good in my questions because my questions relate to "meaningful" to myself. :)
You could have saved keystrokes by saying "I totally believe in the Capitalist version of Marx's Socialism-Wins theory. All socialist things will fall! MUAHAHAHA"

Please, approach the debate with some sensibility or an eye to analysis. This isn't a debate of ideologies, this isn't Marx vs. Smith, this is real people trying to get real health care, and not being able to.
though i will say, i find this hilarious..

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+japan+/+(...)
Apparently. :)

Of course, these things are probably situation dependent no matter what culture you're in. If you're good enough friends with someone, you can probably get away with saying nearly anything ... if they think you're joking.
How much of that volume is referencing corundum?

Clue:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22ruby+on+rails%22%2C+%22j2e...
Nice POST!
ur gay, lol
I just submitted this because I started playing with Google Insights recently and this seemed like a pretty interesting analysis.

One thing that is noticeable is the yearly effect with October having the most searches - probably coinciding with some type of application deadlines.

Another interesting piece is to look at searches by different country - I think it's pretty interesting to see how low the US interest is for the GRE but it's the highest for the LSAT. Pakistan also shows up high for the MCAT which I found pretty interesting. Nepal seems to be high on some of them so it makes me wonder if anything is going on with that.

If Google maintains this database for a long enough time period it may be possible to see long term trends in the data - maybe the US had a much higher interest in the GRE decades ago.

Does anyone know if these other countries have test that have similar names? That would skew the results.
It's a surprisingly efficient way of doing things. Much more so than having lots of private companies, each with shareholders demanding profits be returned

It's remarkable how our historical examples of this efficiency are so often ignored by all. I mean, consider how the soviets of the USSR succeeded in making that nation an economy to be reckoned with. And Chairman Mao's great leap forward was able to engineer a populace that succeeded in its grand goal of vaulting beyond the waste of the capitalist West. If only the industry of South Korea could prosper in the way that Kim Jong Il has guided his people into a paradise of plenty, then all Korean people could join hands in brotherhood.
For the record, if you want to deal in conjecture and annecdotal evidence there's just as much stacked up against the health care system in canada. I can't tell you how many times I've read of people dying while waiting for a test or surgery. There are even the proven stories of wealthy canadians flying to the U.S. and paying for surgeries privately.

More than anything stories like this (or the ones about Canada) are scare tactics to support a political agenda. The fact still remains, a hospital in the U.S. by law CAN NOT turn away a patient for financial reasons. No one is dying on the street for lack of health care. At the same time Canada generally manages to take care of the great majority of its citizens without killing them by making them wait.

Bottom Line: The U.S. system has problems but so does the system in Canada, the U.K. and elsewhere. What we in the U.S. need to be doing is looking for a third option.
An amusing combination of titles:

In Search of Concise Software

Git Breezily Handles our 500,000-line Enterprise Java Project
Then explain to me the mechanism by which the universial health care allocate resource? It is one thing to have a guranteed source of revenue via taxation, it is quite another to manages the allocation of resources more efficently than a free agent in a free market.

Even in a socialist system, scarcity still exists.

The free market have an obvious mechanism and it is called profit and loss.