skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have worked very, very briefly with medical devices...

The main thing to keep in mind is that biology is mind-bogglingly complex. More complex than our human, conscious minds can possible realize. This makes pills, devices and such much less reliable than one would imagine as an engineer inventing things, so the original poster has A point.

But... the very complexity of the biology field also means that the received ideas of experts about what is or isn't possible probably aren't right either. Probably, on the average, no one is right. So the experts could easily be wrong in telling you that a given approach will fail ... but it probably will fail anyway, just because most things fails.

However, it does seem like machines that rely on external tech might be easier than machines that rely on understanding biology - a machine which just finds and kills cancer cells seems more plausible than something tells the body itself to do something since the machine isn't depending the body to do anything.
Well, I'm actually in the same problem, but I inject Python every time I can, because is not the same saying:

"Can I do this in Python?"

than

"I already did this in Python!"
This is how a great auto-response message looks like
This auto-generated email was so nice that I though other startups here might benefit from learning one more way to keep your users happy:

--

We bet your email was intended for someone else - likely the person who started or invited you to sign a GroupCard.

Alas, your email landed here with me, your loyal GroupCard autoresponder. Though I'm friendly, it's unlikely that I'm who you really wanted to reach.

You should re-send your email, but directly to the intended recipient.

But if you're having difficulty, or if you have any feedback about GroupCard, we're here for you. You can email our team at feedback@groupcard.com. Heck, you can even reach us on the phone at 1-800-505-0810. . We'll amaze you with how much we care and want to
help.

Happy GroupCard'ing !

-Your Loyal GroupCard Autoresponder
Oh God.

We can automate a process, and with technology we can automate increasingly complex processes. But intelligence is a fundamentally different problem from the things you describe. I am a believer in the possibility of strong AI. I can envision and would like to live a world of sentient machines. But your way of thinking, as expressed here, will not get us there.

Let's take the example of robot soccer players. I agree with you, it's basically just an engineering problem. We have robots that walk around, we have computers that can solve ballistic problems in real time, we have networking and so on. I can easily, easily imagine a winning soccer team made up entirely of robots. If I was rich I would tempt you with money to hasten the creation of such a thing.

What I can not imagine - or rather, what I am unable to conceive a route towards - is a robotic soccer player that announces one day it is sick of putting balls into goals and is retiring to take up painting instead.

Or take chess. I can't beat my computer at it any more, although that's not saying much as I was never all that good. Yes, I can envision a chess program that says 'hmm, you keep losing, how about I start without a pawn until you improve?'. Indeed, we're not so far away from being able to build a good chess tutor, not least because chess play has a fully defined grammar and so winning positions in chess games could be regarded as true statements in a formal system. On the other hand, further development in this area is unlikely to produce software with a secret addiction to backgammon.

We have software that can create pictures or music in a certain style. But although they can produce interesting and unexpected results they're still horrendously limited in other ways. If you request a new composition and don't like the results, will your computer denounce you as an ungrateful philistine, while mocking your bourgeois notions of formalism?

Computers don't want to do things. We want them to do things, and currently all we know how to do is build simulacra of ourselves. Doubtless, as time goes on, we will be able to build more general-purpose simulacra - our robotic soccer players will also compete at rugby and tennis, our chess programs will handle a wider domain of dynamic analytical problems, our artistic software will employ inductive processes that begin with general concepts of proportion, contrast and so forth.

But we are not going to get to real artificial intelligence until we start building systems that are a) self-modifying and b) allowed to engage in perverse behavior whose purpose is not obvious to us.
It's nice when you are born on second base... Unfortunately, you think it means you hit a double.

I have a friend who lived off of pell grants and loans to make it through a degree. He did not have the aptitude for math or science, and came from a very poor family (his father, at 80, still works at a Burger King.) He did not have connections from his family. He did not have any of the life lessons on how to survive in a middle class system.

He ended up graduating, and could not find a job of any sort. It's quite possible, had he grown up white, straight, and middle class, that he would have been fine.

He tried to go back to school, thinking that this would be the answer. (After all, it delayed loan payback.) In the meantime, he did what he was able to do: sell drugs. He went to graduate school and sold drugs because he couldn't gather the money to move, he couldn't get a job, and he didn't have options that we with privilege do.

It's fun to laugh at the whiny white kids who rack up college credit cards and have to stay at home, but personal responsibility only goes so far.

(PS -- my friend now has a drug conviction, a risk he ran because of one of the choices he made to survive. He now has even fewer choices.)
Riiight. There is always an explanation. So the theory is someone is going to hire a teenager for less than minimum wage to begin with but then will give them wonderful opportunities later on. Or better yet, someone working for less than min wage will use that on their resume to great effect.

It would be great if we all lived in the world of conservative economists.
In many countries other than the US (Japan for instance), there is no such compulsion for young adults to move out of their family homes. Indeed, in some cultures moving out of ones family home as a young adult is as taboo as not moving out is here.
I think Real World Haskell might help you with that, and after that, The Road to Mathematics and Logic.
For what it's worth, I've contacted the appropriate people and the Bing speller team has reproed the issue and is investigating. Sorry you ran into it.
Code complexity != insecurity.

Case in point, many cryptographic algorithms are complex (by non-cryptographic standards) but essential. That doesn't make them insecure, just less inscrutable.

It is when 'things are missed' in information security that insecurities occur (e.g. developer is not aware of strcpy limitations so uses it regardless) - writing a simpler malloc will not save you from a stack-based overflow.
Nothing but utmost respect for this guy. I hope he succeeds
Sweet jesus that header is annoying. I hope he gets slugged in the gut by a mugger on his way out of Whole Foods.
Great article, but why write your own XML parser?

I didn't write my own XML parser. I wrote my own parser for XML-minus-stuff-which-makes-it-really-hard-to-parse.

...given that there are so many solid and well-tested solutions...

Name a simple well-tested XML parser with a good security track record. Heck, never mind simple and well-tested... name an XML parser with a good security track record. As far as I know, none exist.
I clicked through an entire 30 of these slides before bailing; they contain nothing about commercial uses of functional programming or Haskell.
Hm, okay. I guess I never took the speed into account.
Dividing free and paid features in "freemium" products
I suspect that research isn't the problem...

Consider, if cancer prevention cost as much per person as cancer curing, it would be impossible to implement. So the prevention that makes any sense is cheap prevention.

Moreover, we know of many cheap preventative activities, especially exercise and healthy diet.

Unfortunately, it is hard to get people to engage in healthy activities. Indeed, it is easier to get someone to spend $100 on a bogus cancer prevention pill than it is get them to spend nothing at all and exercise regularly.

So I'm sure research efforts will continue on creating a pill to give people who live unhealthily the effects of a healthy lifestyle... but I'm more than skeptical
AT&T is living proof that the "free market" has failed. I know we don't have a free market, but we are led to believe that we do by pro-business establishment conservatives.
You may take it for granted, but a major trait that employers look for is simple employability: someone that can show up on time, not cause problems, not throw attitude, and not steal from the company. I'll take someone who spent three summers lifeguarding for the same company over someone with no work experience any day.

Pretend that starting a company wasn't an option for you. I guarantee there is some minimum wage level that would have knocked out the bottom rung in your career ladder.
Well, is Perl really a problem? Anything you can do in Python you can do in Perl just as easily; Perl actually has more abstractions available for the programmer than Python. (Grammars in regexes, real closures, coroutines, a metaobject system, etc.)

Also, last time I checked the programming language shootout, Perl 5.10 is slightly faster than Python 3.

So with that in mind, the logical "step up" from Perl would be something like Haskell. Python is pretty much Perl with different syntax, less features, and the impression that it's "cleaner" because nobody ever bothered using it for "quick and dirty" scripting.
This is from http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=424
I'm surprised people aren't more up in arms about AT&T continuously tracking their location.
David Pogue says simplicity sells (2006 but timeless)
I don't like assignment during comparison either. I do like TCO and ++.
many cryptographic algorithms are complex

I'd dispute that. Aside from multiprecision arithmetic for asymmetric cryptography, which I'll admit uses a fair number of lines of code, most cryptographic algorithms are quite small (SHA256 and AES are both well under 200 LoC); and all well-written cryptographic code should be "straight-line" code, i.e., with a cyclomatic complexity of 1.

e.g. developer is not aware of strcpy limitations so uses it regardless

Nothing will save you from developers who blindly use functions without knowing what they do. I was writing for the benefit of those people who already meet a certain minimum level of competence.
I _love_ assignment during comparison. shrug

I coded too much in C. I like all four!
Sure, but the point is that with this particular opinion, it's not prima facie obvious. As a matter of fact, it's not even clear that you're correct.

Reasonable people can (and do) disagree on the net impact of minimum wage laws when considering it as a thought exercise.

Again, I'm not bashing you for this. But the idea that someone with the same political leaning as you comes up and says, "Yes! This person says what I believe succinctly, therefore HN is greater than other sites!!!!1!" is not sound.
Whether we have the mental capability to simulate any amount of computer time does not mean that the algorithms are not deterministic in nature and that they could be simulated and computed by any turing capable machine, including the human brain. It might take a while, but that's the only difference.

Anyway, I can see I am not going to be able to convince you of this and it is getting late so I cede to you.

But thank you for the interesting exchange.
I found 8 hours of free time to be insufficent for leisurely activities such as writing games and making electronics.

I also found schools to be rather banal. I certainly do not care about taking AP classes. My weakest point is mathematics and I throughly depise any math class.

I rather have more free time and a real programming job for the 4 years I been in high school.
Google App Engine Launcher for Windows
I think you meant to use the word "opinion" where you mistakenly used the word "fact".

Personally, I don't see how the comment is thoughtful enough to merit the number of votes it is getting. It's just an assertion of truth by someone on the internet with a conservative opinion. I can find the same level of discourse on any newspaper website that allows anonymous comments.
Yes. Though Haskell allows imperative style (via Monads), too.
I think this is the sort of thing Google Squared wishes it was. I'd love to see it. What other datasets/search results are there like this?
Thanks for clearing that up. I wrote from my unreliable memory.
Negative thinking feels bad. Maybe he's never actually experienced it. A better explanation is needed.
On the other hand, it seems that limiting choices limits buyer's remorse.
The Ethics of Human Enhancement
http://iamtpain.smule.com/mysongs/uid/1/3532/?did=

This is me doing it...

This is a really great app. We had half the people in my office out in a room we use for presentations with this hooked up to the PA. We were all laughing our butts off the whole time, having a lot of fun.

THAT sort of thing will sell...

Very very good job, whoever wrote this.
That's definitely what I'm considering for a (future) web app.

Rich front end in cappuccino, talking basically to a bare web api on the back end.
Court Allows Woman to Sue Bank for Lax Security After $26,000 Stolen by Hackers
If you're talking about sports video games, the game knows of and keeps track of everything going on in the game world.
Is there a query string parameter that I can use to get this as a .csv? When I copy/paste it into Open Office, I get lots of extra blank rows inserted in there.
I don't understand why most developers would use a custom auth system. Django's auth system worked fine for me... I just added a UserProfile model to supplement with more fields.

Trying to turn Django development into a cookie cutter process seems silly.

Do it your own way. Learn it. Understand it. Django is a magical and powerful beast that can be used in many wonderful ways.
That often works, but if you don't then teach others on the language and your code it will get ripped out the minute after you leave.
You know, Marcus Ranum once decided to write an HTTP server "minus the stuff in HTTP that makes it hard to write a safe HTTP server" for his Network Flight Record intrusion detection product.

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/1999_1/0736.h...

Not that you're Marcus Ranum. Among other things, you never provoked us into finding a horrible flaw in your product. SO WATCH YOUR MOUTH, BUDDY.

It really is a common failure mode, though. "OpenSSL looks scary, so I'll just implement a subset of SSL on my own."
Well, in that vein you would also have to include child labor laws, compulsory education and all the other ways that 25 has become the new 15. Adulthood came a lot sooner 100 years ago.

But I'm curious, what's wrong with family cohabitation past 18? Its virtues have made it the norm across much of the world and throughout history. Modern America is a but of an outlier here ("in a good way", right? I know I know, please spare the formulaic response).
The problem with not memorizing phone numbers occurs when you don't have your contacts list with you. Automatic synchronization of your list to multiple places is a partial solution.
use the peanut butter and jelly sandwich exercise.

ask them as a group to give instructions one by one for building a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. you perform each instruction precisely as given.

them: "put peanut butter on the bread"
you: put the jar of peanut butter onto the loaf of bread. ask for the next instruction.

they'll get it pretty fast.
Among other things, you never provoked us into finding a horrible flaw in your product

I haven't? Gosh, I'd better try harder. Please download the tarsnap client code and look for horrible security flaws. :-)
If it works for you, it works great - if it doesn't, you're kind of screwed.

Where "works for you" the vast majority of the time really just means "the model fits your needs" (that is, username that fits the validator, non-unique email addresses, and so forth).

Don't get me wrong, I'm really grateful for contrib.auth, I just find myself butting heads with it fairly often.
Tetris players are not block heads
Counter-intuitive lessons learned from start-up life
I used a very similar technique, but using two people. The one would give the other instructions to tie his shoe-laces. (Almost every-one failed to give succinct instructions and that was my way of demonstrating 'program bugs').

This was followed by a 'Hello World Tie Your Shoe-Laces' program!
TBH, my career ladder didn't start until I was offered a part-time credit+pay position by my programming teacher in year 2 of community college.

Before that, I was making 126% minimum wage at my first job (movie theater). So, I suppose if minimum wage had been higher I wouldn't have wasted three years of my life cleaning up used condoms and dirty diapers from the floor of a theater.

But it probably wouldn't have kept me from being offered the (mostly credit) 3-month development project at the school I was going to. And arguably, that set up my career more than anything.
Just by saying that, you've already screwed yourself. =)
'horrendous failure' led founders to revolutionary... nearly broke. Repeatedly.
Essentially a call to arms for the FP community to pursue outreach.
I'm a fan of sitting down, dividing free and paid users in your market, and then mapping the features to the offering such that folks will shake out where you expect them to.

I don't explicitly say "Free for parents, $30 for teachers / Fortune 500 companies / parties" anywhere on my site, but that is essentially what the 15-card free trial cap does.

Your free users are not an undifferentiated mass with a static probability of converting. They've got different needs. Figure out whose needs you can satisfy while charging money for. Do it. Then, for folks you can't conveniently monetize, figure out how you can derive business value from them anyway.

(Stupidly simple: ask them to link to you in your signup mail. This won't take you five seconds to implement, but it works, and you can use all the SEO help you can get to attract more paying users.)
Fighting terrorism the Silicon Valley Way [video]
I just went there. #1 question? "What are the must hit brothels on a biz trip to Prague?" Yeah, that's classy right there.
Algorithmic complexity is dwarfed by real world software complexity the vast majority of the time. However, even for pure math I think the thesis still stands just fine: more complex mathematical proofs are more likely to contain flaws than simple ones. Things "can be missed" at any level, in real code or theoretical, which is why you want to minimize any opportunities for things to be missed.
DMCA notice to Posterous posted to Posterous
I'm not a big fan of the current color scheme.
I know it'll go away someday,

Aside from the obvious that just about everything will go away someday, is there a reason you believe this?

From my vantage point (albiet limited) python looks like it has staying power. It is easy to use, effecient enough (and with unladen swallow in development it may get a lot more effecient soon), and currently seems to be gaining ground instead of losing. Eventually I am sure that it and any other language you can possibly name will get supplanted, but I am not aware of any particular reason to expect that any time remotely soon.
Python is remarkable for having a dozen or so major language features disallowed by fiat (removal of the GIL, unrestricted anonymous functions, TCO, braces) but still being extremely powerful, expressive, and used by programmers of all skill levels.

It's difficult to be obscure in Python. Yet if I really need to do something jinky like remapping an outside library's methods, I can do it with a few lines of slightly-uglier code. That's a very hard balance to make.

Good design involves a lot of "no". I don't think languages are an exception.
No I haven't. My security metric for tarsnap is "can the NSA break this"; as much as I respect your abilities, I have a feeling that any security flaws you can find, the NSA can also find.
Shan Zai and open fabrication
I think it depends on your personality type. For me, it'd be more like buying some gadget, then seeing the parade of possibly nicer alternatives that come out in the months that follow...
Let's add a dose of perspective here. Do a job search on craigslist or simplyhired for "php," "rails" and "django" and you'll see that there are vastly more PHP jobs than either (10,726 on simply hired right now) and many more Rails jobs than Django jobs (2,553 vs 328). Django is popular with some circles, such as people reading HN on Saturday nights (which is when that poll was posted), but this does not reflect actual usage.
"Anything you can do in Python you can do in Perl just as easily"

I can't read my Perl code from six months ago like I can read my Python code ages ago.

There are far too many ways to do the same thing in Perl, not every one of them obvious. And I disagree with my past self a lot.
And of course you can override CSS, which we didn't bother to do.
What a great resource.

I wonder why steve jobs hasn't spoken at ted? most other great tech leaders appear to have held court there.
11 Apache Technologies that Have Changed Computing in the Last 10 Years
Perl itself is not the problem. According to my friend, the problem comes from available tools: the ones he needs already exist for python but not for perl.

As for quick and dirty scripting in python: I do it all the time. Hell I just made a little "framework" [1] in python to do this better. I missed the while <> construct from perl for doing filters, so I made it easier to do in python. The funny thing is, many of my quick and dirty python scripts end up looking like more thought was put into them, and being more flexible, than they were ever intended to be.

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi?name=pyCLiFF&version=0.1&...
Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformatted Text and then picking the columns yourself usually works for me in Calc.
Desktop Couch IRC talk
biztravel is mostly intended so that I could dogfood StackExchange (http://stackexchange.com), which is our white label version of the code that runs StackOverflow.com. StackExchange is currently in invite-only beta. I didn't really expect to get a critical mass of road warriors on that site since I'm not planning to spend very much effort promoting it, but I am interested to see how small a StackOverflow-like knowledge exchange site can be and still get enough traffic to work.

Someone, I'm sure, will take travel Q&A far more seriously than I did, and get someone like Rick Steves or a big travel site like Orbitz or TripAdvisor behind it, and that'll be huge. Either way I'm pretty confident that Jeff Atwood's goal of having knowledge exchanges like StackOverflow replace crappy old PHPBB sites everywhere on the Internet is pretty much inevitable and this will be a huge opportunity to create new communities where old entrenched ones used to be locked in.
I use Google Voice free SMS on my iPod Touch with MiFi to stay connected with friends. Always using the www
From my vantage point

I might have dated myself above by mentioning Tcl and Pascal, but I've been programming for a few decades. Without ruining the cosmic punchline: all things go away surprisingly fast.
Dharmesh, the free option in a freemium model usually exists to spread the word, but we have StackOverflow.com to spread the word. And most of these sites people are building will have big audiences, and those audiences are getting it free, so we don't really need a free entry-level option just to get our first customers.
Do what Google Calendar/Outlook does by default.