skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is no real financial incentive to prevent cancer etc, but lots of money and glory for curing people who have got cancer.

Prevention is much harder to sell than cures because the effect of prevention is hard for people to see. If you get cancer, are given a treatment, and you live, you assume that without the treatment you would have died (death being the "counter-factual" observation that corresponds to the factual observation of your not dying), and thus that the treatment effect was big and important. But if you take a preventative treatment and don't get cancer, you don't have an obvious counter-factual to which you can compare your present state of well-being. You don't have the opportunity to realize that without the preventative treatment you would have gotten cancer and died: that counter-factual history never had a chance to play out.
That interface... it's so fluent. I love javascript, for just the reason that it's possible to have beautiful interfaces like this.

Date.today().add(3).days();

Be even better if it let you leave off the brackets like ruby, but oh well.
"A final thought: when in doubt, err on the side of putting more features on the paid side of the divide. It’s easy to add features to the free side; however, removing features from the free side is a recipe for trouble."

This is great insight and I hadn't though of it that way. I was leaning the other way, thinking that you really want to get traction first. Then listen to users and create new features you can charge for (if your current ones are not generating enough conversions). Xobni is one example where they took their search and made a better one for premium.

I really hope this thread gets some discussion. I feel like a lot of companies know they want to do freemium (due to strong network effects, etc) but with a 'wait and see' approach on the free/premium split could be disaster.
Anything in particular? As Joel said, this is mostly a beta testing site, but feedback on the colors would be useful for picking some nice preset color schemes.
sure =). I'm an engineer and not an oncologist so don't quote me on this. The main msg is that treating cancer is really, really hard; as another commenter noted biology is incredibly complicated.

multi-pronged approaches do seem to work best; some variation of that already happens. Large tumors are surgically removed, anti-angiogenesis drugs work by blocking new blood vessels from growing, I mentioned some others. The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs. A reflection of this is that people will pay $50k+ for a drug that will increase life expectancy by a few weeks (or their insurance will, that's another topic).

People like me do train their entire lives to improve this, and we are working on many new possibilities, for example tracking circulating tumor cells and figuring out what DNA mutations they have to see if you can make a drug that is targeted towards deactivating whatever fraction of them actually lead to metastatic disease. Look up the National Cancer Institute's nanotechnology in cancer program to see more of this kind of stuff.

I don't know what the "unlocalized" side effects are and why things are done that way - I will say any kind of advance in treaments is incredibly difficult to achieve because you have to convince MDs and patients to go with something new when there is a tried and tested method, and it is their lives in the balance.
Sure, but that's you. The very vast majority of django devs will find it suits their purpose. The VERY vast majority of Django projects are small and fast. Myself, I've done half a dozen projects, one spanning 20 kLoc, and the rest very small. I've never had a problem with Django auth.

To recommend it as something you should do when you make a Django app is bad advice, particularly for the beginners, who will just be confused by the extra steps.

I recommend anyone who isn't familiar with Django simply do the "My First App" tutorial. After that, the dev will find their own way, and I doubt it will be much like yours, or mine.
I found myself doing several of these things over and over when creating a new Django project, so I made a script that wraps the django-admin.py startproject command. Some of these tips I don't quite understand, like creating a custom authentication backend (I've only had to do this once), and creating global template context processor and middleware files. I prefer to keep those bundled individually with the app that uses it. Also, not all of my apps use forms, so why would I make a forms.py for each app?

My package is on github here: http://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project/tree/master

There's not much documentation because I wasn't really expecting anyone but myself to use it, but basically once it's installed, it'll install a binary file in your path. So instead of

django-admin.py startproject project_name

you would do

create_project project_name

It'll auto-create your wsgi handler, an apps, templates, static/css, static/js, static/images directories, create a localsettings file, and update your settings. It also automatically installs some common django apps I like to use, like django-command-extensions, django-debug-toolbar, django-css, and clevercss. Like I said, I wasn't really planning on other people finding this valuable and using it, so some of these options are customized to my preferences and you'd probably have to hack it a little bit, but maybe someone here will find it helpful.

There's also http://bitbucket.org/neithere/django-harness/src/ which I think might do some similar things, but I found out about it after I already rolled my own thing which works pretty well for me.
Does speed really matter? Bacteria only eat certain things, right? If some mutated type of bacteria could consume more kinds of matter, wouldn't it be a threat?
Are these human composers not "merely following a set of rules", namely quantum mechanics?
I've had several ideas that I keep trying to get someone to steal because I don't have the time to do myself. Such as an "open source dating and brainstorming site." Don't just pair developers to projects. Provide artist, design, QA, project management, tech writers, beta/alpha testers and developers way to seek each other out. Then make it seamless to submit "ideas". Ideas are just that, someone went "dude, it'd be awesome if" and allow feedback. A project can then implement the idea, but it's just a soft link, the project isn't required to follow it at all. And any other project is free to implement it as well. I had the idea when trying to find a graphic/UI designer willing to work on an anemic budget for an open source project (ended up being only about 4-5 hours of time, but I was expecting it to take a couple of weeks to finish).
It's all about the self-promotion. Joe works hard to get his image out there.
One interesting use, I thought, of magnetic monopoles (whether they are fundamental particles or not), would be in the construction of a perpetual motion machine. If it is possible to manufacture these monopoles in a controlled manner, it could be possible to create a turbine that accelerates forever (thus generating free energy)... or am I missing something?
The particular comment about not enforcing private vs. protected reminded me of php4. People bitched and moaned about it.
Their first games were called "Frequency" & "Amplitude" - a bit hard to market! And yes, they did not sell well.
He's not recommending creating an alternative to contrib.auth, he's talking about an auth backend.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#other-auth...

I agree that it's an absurd recommendation, however.
"This is how a great auto-response message looks like"

No.

This is how a great auto-response message looks

or

This is what a great auto-response message looks like
This is what's scary: women still face a very thick glass ceiling in business (not men - the flip scenario comparisons are baseless and for the most part insulting to women, including those who smoke).

More importantly, is it OK that women make up less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEO positions? That's not sad?

To clarify, there's a huge difference between unqualified and less qualified. I would never say men/women are unqualified to do anything...

Fact: There are women who are qualified to be CEO of Fortune 500s.

Assuming selection from the above, she would be more qualified since she would be more likely to 1) be passionate about the product, 2) be an actual consumer of the product, 3) be able to empathize with users of the product, 4) better understand internal value tied to the product...the list goes on.
I played around with the 'strong AI' section but found it to be internally inconsistent, maybe it says more about the makers of the world view manager than it says about the visitors ? Or maybe I am internally inconsistent :)

According to the test there is an inconsistency between:

A simulation is never equivalent to the real thing. (true)

and

One can know that minds exist purely through empirical observation. (true)

The explanation given why these are inconsistent is:

Empirical observation will not be able to distinguish between some being and a simulation of that being, if the simulation is good enough. If simulations can never be equivalent to the real thing, then empirical observation is not enough.

The crux here is that the 'good enough' bit modifies the statement in 'B' after the fact, no simulation is perfect, but now we have to take one that is 'good enough' to be taken for perfect.
>I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

This sounds like the same kind of argument as "intelligent design" people use. ""What else could there be?" is not a religious argument, it's a perfectly reasonably question, and to suggest that there are physical systems that cannot be recreated by computers shows a lack of fundamental theoretical understanding of computation.
Crap article. Loose thinking and loose writing.

Examples:

5) Punctuality

Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up to the pub on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudenesses of the connected age.

Texting is not "the internet".

The ubiquity of free, hard-core pornography on the web has put an end to one of the most dreaded rights of passage for teenage boys – buying dirty magazines.

A right of passage is an agreement that someone has the right to pass through a certain area of land (usually to get to their own land). A rite of passage is a ritual. The author no doubt meant the latter.

10) Watches

Scrabbling around in your pocket to dig out a phone may not be as elegant as glancing at a watch, but it saves splashing out on two gadgets.

Again, phones != internet. Phones had clocks on them long before they had web access.

This could have been a moderately interesting article, but unfortunately it was just gimmicky hot air.
Re: the hockey stick--m..maybe? This is entirely anecdotal evidence, but the "San Francisco" network spreads pretty far across the entire Bay Area (which is pretty quick to adopt services like this, obviously), and you can still find yourself within the top 1,000 checking in once or twice per week (e.g. using the service). Back of the napkin with those figures, I'd estimate regular usership between 10k-20k. Granted they're branching out to new areas and new devices all the time, but I'd still say they're just getting to the blade of that hockey stick.
As far as I can tell we have the same thing going on in our heads.

Anecdote: In physics class (I was a physics major for awhile, so it was a 'real' physics class) there was what I guess was a very complex problem. The professor posed the problem and asked 'how do we solve this', and I raised my hand and told him the integral. It took me about 10 seconds or so f talking to say the entire equation. It blew everyone's mind, but it was really obvious if you could see it. I don't mean to brag, but if I was trying to think it through like socrates in a dialog I would have taken a week.
There are a bunch of (what I consider to be) bugs in the topic files at present. (The QM one is particularly horribly broken -- actual bug rather than mere confusion, I think; the strong-AI one is also pretty bad, but here it's that I think the author of the topic file was confused about some things.)

This will become more interesting if it gains the ability to take uncertainty into account more effectively. Unfortunately, I have my doubts about whether their (firmly logic-based) resolution engine can be made to do this without major work.
Very nice.

I'd like to have them in order of presentation. Still, just the links are nice to have. This will save me some time.
I don't think that is a fair comparison to make.

Current PHP openings are more than likely for legacy web development.

I would meter Mindshare as the number of new applications being developed in each of the respective frameworks.
Either you are or I am. My guess is that you're assuming that you can manufacture unlimited quantities of these things without expending any energy to do so.

(If the existence of magnetic monopoles enables you to build a perpetual motion machine, why doesn't the (uncontroversial) existence of electric monopoles?)
I think I found your email address and emailed you.
> It's difficult to be obscure in Python.

It's occasionally difficult to be obscure with Python syntax. It's not at all difficult to be obscure with anything in Python above that level. Even then, if you do weird things with metaclasses or decorators, it's easy to be obscure with Python.
Are you a hacker? Or an idea guy?
I think this is technically a custom bounce-back message because you replied to their default "do not reply" address.

This is a great approach - especially over sending a standard bounce with an error like most mail servers are setup with by default.

Plus, this goes back to a past argument about whether to use do-not-reply addresses at all, and since it's very difficult to get around, this is a nice approach.
Interesting, I wrote something similar here:

http://github.com/tvon/django-gig/tree/master

Yours is written better... and mine pisses all over the default Django layout (which I've never been a fan of).
Wow, there are some real gems on that site.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/felipekurc/they-don%C2%B...
I think you perhaps I wasn't clear: I'm not in any way suggesting that, because it is from India, it is automatically spam. I am suggesting that, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of .in websites that I've been to, been sent to, or seen are either (a) nefarious places, (b) content theives (i.e. screen scrapers), or crappy blog sites who do nothing but re-post the same "funny pic!" over and over.

I mean seriously - if you saw a link today for, "imbored.ru", would you (a) chuckle at how clever the name is and then click the link, or (b) immediately think, "It's either content theft or a nefarious site"? It's just what it is.

I could make the argument that it's not that .us was made popular by delicio.us; it's that other companies haven't made the .us domains "seedy" (yet?).
>There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.

It sounds like you're saying that each supervirus mankind creates marginally increases the chance that a Bad Thing will happen. Isn't marginally increasing the chance that a Bad Thing will happen also Bad?

Also, how close do you think that HIV and MRSA are to the upper bound on supervirus potency?
Sigh.. That joke sucked.
I wasn't trying to be insulting; I would give you the benefit of the doubt that you were not being insulting to men who wear makeup, are passionate about it, etc. I picked the cigar and manmag examples for exactly that reason: the customers are overwhelmingly one gender but it is not at all exclusive.

There are very few women in executive positions, that is a fact. But it does not follow that a white, middle-aged gentleman is less qualified because he's a man. He was unqualified because he was a finance wonk who didn't understand makeup and fashion.
Applying a statistical model trained on previously observed input is a reasonable description of much of human behavior.
Michael Jackson burial video
Or indeed gravitic monopoles.
Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel
If you go to the actual link (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjGlYH-8AK8ffDa6o2bYl...), you can sort them 3 ways (Date, Event Name and Speaker).
Nope.

I read the response that pointed out that the worst case here was slightly earlier death and realized that in many cases the worst case is exactly what I said it was, someone is out the cost of a Coke.

The fact that some medical "treatments" will kill you is not necessary useful when evaluating a different treatment.

It's important to evaluate things based on their actual costs and benefits, not the costs and benefits of other things.
"Current PHP openings are more than likely for legacy web development."

That's quite a massive assumption. If we do a job search on startup-specific job boards, (like startuply.com and startuphire.com), you'll see the same sort of thing. On Statuply, "php" returns 280 hits, "rails" 121 and "django" 35. On StartUpHire, "php" 458, "rails" 119, "django" 9.

Long story short, don't believe every poll you read on the internet.

Also, don't take this as me talking bad about Django; it's a great framework and programming is not a popularity contest.
I don't believe that 'people' ('scientists') thought birds could not fly, or were lighter than air.
Why isn't TED's website organized as such.
A cordless future for electricity
This is the same submission that has been posted at least 5 times in the last 24 hours. Only difference is this time it's in video form.

ref:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803968

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803993

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804681

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805158
hire enough engineers and buy enough hardware that scaling won't be an issue for long

I don't know about that. Twitter is still having problems with downtime due to scaling. The way I see it: don't completely ignore scaling, but don't focus on it (at all) at the beginning. Keep it in your mind though, and try not to close yourself in, and create something which can't be scaled without significant modifications to services. Do not confuse that with modifications to your code. If you're going to scale large, expect at least one complete re-write, but don't offer services which are incapable of scaling.
I used to work at Palantir (full disclosure). This is hardly spam. They're legit -- they've raised $30MM over four years and cracked a market they said a startup could NEVER crack: the government.

If this isn't a remarkable story, I don't know what is.
> These are social problems with simple technical solutions.

that don't work.

I'd much rather change phone numbers than screw around with a whitelist and the other solution is worse than whitelists because it connects my phone number to my e-mail, which I don't give out. (Thanks to various directory services, phone numbers provide location information. Why would I want my e-mail to get geo-targetted spam?)
Sometimes it's easy to get caught up hating on Apache because it isnt lighttpd or nginx or $lightweighthttpserver. But there are a lot of pretty cool Apache projects, and they have done a very good job in the OSS in the enterprise game. I don't know if I would agree with "changed computing" that is a pretty big task, but 'had a lot of influence' I totally agree with.
Developer passion and how to find it
Question:

We have started a company to solve one of the biggest problems in financial services: providing basic financial services such as money transfer and micro-purchases to unbanked consumers in Latin America (particularly Mexico) and Africa. Our customers are usually getting remittances from family members migrating to other areas - such as Mexicans moving to LA.

The company is based in silicon valley.

Our challenge is that finding programmers with an extreme passion for this space in silicon valley is difficult. Everyone in SV uses mint.com but how many people in SV come from poor families in Latin America or Africa that are dependent upon money transfers from family members in the US?

I'm struggling with how to solve this problem as we start to scale the number of programmers we need to build our business.

We have found a couple of really good programmers in SV but we've experienced some churn via people who have less interest in this space and/or don't really understand the need for what we're doing as they can't "experience it" first hand. This is a big financial opportunity and will help a lot of lives but it's not sexy like consumer internet plays.

Your thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Bill Barhydt
bill@m-via.com
"Greed only took over about 25-30 years ago."

To which my only response can be, "bwuh?"

What, was there some sort of virus that ran through the population and rewrote all our genomes so that we're suddenly selfish?

Greed predates humanity. I mean that literally. For any definition of "humanity". All life forms are greedy. They have to be, to survive competition with all the other greedy life forms. If something changed 25-30 years ago, it wasn't the amount of greed in the world.
Startups crack government all the time. We just don't hear about it because it is usually insiders and companies that have ownership structures that give them special preference in the contracting process.

It could be an article promoting the American Cancer society that doesn't mean it needs to be reposted multiple times per day.
Very, very slow for me.
This is fascinating, thank you. I've been told a lot of the issues surrounding the boomerang generation in Italy has to do with policies that are defensive of older employees, thus making it more difficult for young adults to find jobs.

I was interested in correlating these numbers with birth rates, as I knew Italy had among Europe's lowest and France had among the highest. But the results are disappointing (or maybe not, I'm not a statistician). FWIW, the amended table is below, using numbers from the CIA World Factbook.

Share of those at age 25-29 still living in parent's home, %;
birth rate per thousand
Men Women Birth Rate
France 22.5 10.3 12.57
Germany 28.8 12.7 8.18
Great Britain 20.8 10.8 10.65 (for the UK)
Spain 64.8 47.6 9.72
Greece 62.6 32.1 9.45
Italy 66.0 44.1 8.18
More importantly, is it OK that women make up less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEO positions? That's not sad?

Your feelings about whether this is sad, in the absence of further information about why it's so, signals mostly whether you care about equality of outcome or equality of opportunity.
1) If you don't like the article, don't upvote it. As for how newsworthy it is, this isn't some pork barrel IT project -- it's computer science being deployed to catch terrorists in the field.

2) This is one of the first pieces of mass media coverage Palantir has gotten -ever- -- they've been under wraps for years.
From what I've heard, Palantir seems like a damn cool company tackling really interesting problems.

But the work ethic required does not appeal to me whatsoever. Does anyone work there? How do you do it?