skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has (or had if you are a strong optimist) a rare form of cancer, I strongly dislike the restrictions on medical research. I understand the desire to prevent horrific abuses (e.g. Tuskegee) but I think the argument against experimentation in fully-informed, rational patients is weak at best. When my cancer comes back and if it lies beyond contemporary treatment, I invite them to pump me full of whatever they can think of. At worst, my outcome would be largely in line with my expected outcome -- but at least I had a modicum of hope. Either way, they are likely to learn something.
i am amazed that nothing has replaced DNS yet.

while i don't like squatters, I do believe by holding onto domains they are taking a big risk that there won't be a sudden shift away from the current DNS system in the future. i think the domain market is subject to black swans.

I wouldn't be shocked if in 10 years we rely on something else entirely to navigate to websites and .coms become virtually worthless.

i can see why a piece of physical property has lasting value and won't be subject to extreme changes, but i think the value of domains in the future has a very fat tailed distribution and there is a decent risk of them all plummeting to zero.

it is certainly a bubble. the question is how long it will last.
Wait, you mean we're not engineers? (us Software Engineers, that is)
Sometimes a debugger is simply the fastest route to isolating and solving an issue.

I recently had to track down a kernel issue caused by an piece of code unrelated to my current work casting a signed value to unsigned and eventually triggering a kernel panic. Thanks to remote kernel debugging, I could simply step through the code path and track the changes. If I accidentally overstepped the failure point, I just reset the virtual machine back to the snapshot point and reattached the debugger.

Did this mean that I didn't know how the code behaved? No -- I had to understand the code, but there was very little chance that I would quickly eyeball a single incorrect cast in a comparison 6 degrees of separation from where my own code was being run without being able to trace the issue a couple times in a debugger as it happened.
[Phoronix] BFS Scheduler Benchmarks
I think the whole settlement is misguided, not just because of the free licenses.

For one it treats all authors as though they are part of the authors guild.

Secondly the Gutenberg project was doing just fine for orphaned books.

This project is the largest wholesale copyright infringement in history and it looks like google is getting away with it.

Ask individual authors how they feel about their books appearing online without their permssion. Google should not have been able to negotiate this the way they did, the authors guild should not have been able to bargain away the rights of the individual authors the way they did.
Period Pain (it's about time intervals for lots of nodes)
The secret to procrastination is to do it productively. :)
Finance is important, but Facebook is such an essential networking tool, professionally and personally, that I completely disagree with you. Facebook solves a multitude of "real problems" -- just because some people "waste time" on it does not mean it isn't a serious tool. Without Facebook, for instance, I simply would not know nearly as much about the lives of my old friends and professional acquaintances -- this alone makes it very practical.

Not only this, but Facebook helps me organize the many people I meet each day, lets me easily keep in touch with people I care about, lets me know who is in each city I visit so I can arrange meetups, facilitates much of my social life (invites/mixers/who's going to what), provides introductions, etc.

Mint did not even exist two years ago, and people dealt with their finances then just fine. The difference between using Mint and not (in finance) is the same as the difference in using Facebook or not (in networking), in my opinion.
So, Facebook is to chocolate what curing cancer is to one's family. That's an interesting view. I get your original point, and I still believe a more careful choice of words would have been more appropriate...

An outsider who accidentally finds HN will probably think this is a community of slightly emotional retarded, detached, autistic nerds living in a complete fantasy world where the problems are server outages and the discussions circle around social media and childish Python Vs. Ruby drivel. I am a hardware guy and sometimes I think HN'ers have lost their sense of reality. Imagine what a more normal person would think...
They are not problems as such. youtube/facebook are more on the entertainment side of things. Nothing wrong with that........most of the money is in entertainment.
> grab those awesome domains before the vanish...

hhmmm :)
There is something wrong in a profession in which to do better/more work you need to make less money...
My 20 year projection for Google: Energy & then Finance
I also find that a debugger encourages a technique of just tracing through the code until "a-hah, that's where fooBing get reset to dingy. I should add a clause to reset it to dingy only if barBong is set."

Someone actually skilled in their craft would say:

"a-hah, that's where fooBing get reset to dingy. now I understand what's happening, let's understand why".

Remember, this is kernel code we're talking about here. In user-space, I rarely need to use a debugger because nearly all issues are caught during initial development by unit and regression testing.

However, there are still times where something goes terribly wrong -- sometimes in vendor code (or in the case of the kernel, hardware) -- and I wouldn't give up my debugger for the world.
What's being proposed is trimming it of less useful libraries (and ones without maintainers, low test coverage, etc). No one wants it to "just go away".
OK OK OK, sheesh, I'm going to redo the test. I was out of town over the weekend and really haven't had a chance to update it.

It is a small scale test, it was done on my macbook pro... I'm redoing it on better hardware and tests.
Clean and Air Cooler
Perhaps the value of the story is that it pays to have your headquarters and founders in the valley. Your programmers, content writers, etc, can be anywhere. For many startups, having your labor outside the valley may be critical. Is this a trend?
Here's the thread: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/stdlib-sig/2009-September/0...
There's something fishy about that. It seems unlikely that even a perfectly intelligent bot could, for instance, never have to wait for the flying turtles to line up (as when bouncing across a chasm). They're just always there in the perfect arrangement when mario gets to them.
Nowadays though, convertible debt actually has a pre-money valuation tied to it and is just a faster financing mechanism.
Ask HN: Hackers and Religion
Just out of pure curiosity, how many of you are religious or have faith? I think certain types of people make up hackers, and I am curious about relationship between hackers and religion.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are ignorant about how good their circumstances are relative to most of the world's people.

But how does being judgemental towards the ignorant help the unfortunate?
"We want someone who is passionate enough to spend the weekend working on something cool"

Tell them you want more cash and equity for your hard work. If they don't give it to you, quit.

Why are you putting yourself through this torture?
Liberate - sure; Delete - maybe later (if ever).
Singapore Startup iTwin Launches at TechCrunch50 Conference
The device used in "No Country for Old Men" is called a Bolt Gun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol

It is routinely used to stun/kill various livestock in slaughterhouses... In this case it was a pneumatic bolt gun and probably something that they made from scratch for the film...
"Well done for saying we should cure cancer though."

That was cliché, I admit. In any case, cancer is only one problem. Cancer is a very difficult problem that kills many people. There are diseases that kill as many or more people than cancer, and that are easier to fight than cancer, but that no one pays attention to...

Why is that? Because cancer kills rich people too, while some diseases only kill poor people. Poor people cannot pay for vaccines, or top-notch healthcare, or even basic healthcare actually... so there's no market there. Bill Gates wrote all about it, so I am not claiming to have found anything new. Thanfully, Gates has the money to do something about it, while I barely have the money to pay my rent (I live in California, after all).
An outsider who accidentally finds HN will probably think this is a community of slightly emotional retarded, detached, autistic nerds living in a complete fantasy world where the problems are server outages

I'd hope so. This is not a save-the-world forum. It's Hacker News. We do think more about server problems than cancer when we are on here. It does not mean we consider server problems to be a bigger problem than cancer.

My original post was about relative use of Mint vs. Facebook. You're making it facebook vs. cancer. A more appropriate argument would be facebook/mint vs. cancer which is a completely valid debate(except I'll probably end up agreeing with you wholeheartedly)--just not for this thread.
I agree there are better RDB choices for a finance app. But if you know the ins and outs of MySQL, it can work for you.
>> "Mint has nothing to do with taxes like axod says."

>> "If you are not one of those people who has money to keep track of or you don't balance your checkbook, then sure the value is hard to see."

I was really trying to work out why Mint seems to be valued highly in the US. I can see some of the differences now.

The idea of having a 'checkbook' is incredibly quaint to most people in the UK. No one uses checks anymore here, not for 10-20 years, we're used to free banking, online account management, direct debits/transfers, etc. The majority of people have direct debits (Automated bill payments) setup for all their bills. They have their pay paid automatically into their bank by transfer (All free of course).

Banks provide all the tools we need to manage our money for free generally. Some online banking tools even allow you to access other banks that you may have accounts with (With your approval), so you can see all your accounts from one interface, and get a better picture.

I still think the added burden of having to file your own taxes would make you more likely to need something like mint, but it's probably more the extreme differences in consumer banking that's the bigger reason.

If I had to pay my bills by check, I'd go insane.
i read it as ppl from those countries are on the Mint team and live in the valley.
"But how does being judgemental towards the ignorant help the unfortunate?"

That's a really good point. I think it's not a matter of helping the unfortunate, but a matter of not insulting the unfortunate. I was fortunate to have been born in a relatively rich country. Others were less fortunate. I may not have the power to change things, but at least acknowledging the bigger problems, prioritizing them and putting things in perspective is the at least respectful. Someone who's miserable about Facebook's server outage is, basically, implying someone who is miserable because his son is dying of some preventable disease and he can't afford the healthcare...
why do people just upvote anything if it is YC related? at least someone can congratulate the team or someone from YC can share an anecdote related to the company. Why just upvote?

BTW, Congratulations, guys.
Ask PG: Karma Data Dump
This might be outside the scope of the Ask HN tag (although it is not really a feature suggestion either), but can you provide an SQL dump of all users Karma (i.e. url, vote sums, and dates). I think there are many people who might be curious about the statistical properties.
From my anecdotal experience, hackers tend to have a distaste for organized religion. Atheism and Agnosticism seem to run strong among programmers.
Curiousity about systems makes you a hacker, be it religion or a machine or behaviour. If you don't question your beliefs, you are not a hacker.
I think that treating anything that can feel pain as a 'laboratory test organism' is the sort of thinking that leads to gross human rights abuses and de-humanization in general. There's not a huge gap between ignoring the screams of small animals/primates and ignoring the screams of another human.

I'm by no means totally against animal testing, but I have to disagree strongly with your callous attitude toward the process. Animal testing should be done as humanely as possible.
Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're using CloudFront.
There's nothing wrong in discussing highly technical problems just as long as one keeps in minds that there are bigger problems outside one's small bubble.
I would be one of those people.
"This recent mess with filesystem write semantics (http://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ ) has proven you can't even rely on POSIX."

I have to disagree.

The "problem" resides in the way ext4 writes data to the disk. If you need crash-resistance (the data-loss occurs on computer crashes) ext4 is not for you. And keep in mind if you really need it, ext3 isn't for you either. JFS or XFS, perhaps, and ZFS, but I never intentionally crashed a machine with unwritten data since, perhaps, my Apple II days.

This has nothing to do with POSIX.
For those who don't know what that is, WP says:

"Confirmation bias is an irrational tendency to search for, interpret or remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions or working hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. These biases in information processing are distinguished from the behavioral confirmation effect (also called self-fulfilling prophecy), in which a person's expectations influence their own behavior."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
iTwin is pretty cool. Not sure if it will make Flash obsolete, but it does get around the problem of having to upload everything into the cloud.

Not that it's something Dropbox couldn't replicate (without the hardware) and I do agree with the distribution challenge that the judges at TC50 brought up.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253682

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237517
Aside from having access to all the Java web frameworks, Clojure has Compojure and Conjure on the higher level and Ring (equivalent to Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack) for lower level.

I wouldn't discount Clojure as not ready for complicated web applications based on it's young age; Java servlets can be written in Clojure. Not that Java servlets are great, but they are widely used for non-trivial web sites.

Clojure is great at removing the ugliness of some Java APIs, I recall that Compojure is built atop servlets.
It's nice to find the root cause, but, sometimes, it can't be done unless you have access to the underlying source code.

Too bad Windows doesn't come with it.
Let your child walk to school: safety today vs safety tomorrow
Sean Ellis has said that a startup has achieved product/market fit when >40% of its visitors would be 'very disappointed' if the product were no longer available. http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/
They actually say in the article that they have had similar results with tendon repair (in the section where they're talking about bone repair). I'm not sure about other soft tissues.

Its unfortunate that because of the laws against the uses human stem cells we already miss out on a bunch of very valid and useful soft-tissue treatments!

There's actually a company that is already doing soft-tissue regeneration (specifically tendons) using autologous stem cells for dogs, very cool stuff! I'll post the link to the article if I can find it! Maybe this could be a viable alternative though!
I think teej is arguing the exact opposite of what you interpreted his comment as saying.
I seem to be banned from TechCrunch and have to go through google cache if I really want to read something linked from HN. Still trying to decide if that's a good thing or not. It says:

TechCrunch is currently down for some scheduled maintenance. In the meantime, please check out the other sites on our network of blogs for the latest in tech news:

The above is followed by a list of links. Been this way for at least a week now.
Yup, that's the point.
They do fool my mother, who sees things like this constantly (constantly enough to ask me about them a lot). The sad thing is that they're completely obvious to me (an XP-based picture on her Vista laptop). If not for people like my mother, I'd be completely ignorant of this matter given my linux box at home and browsing habits.
Widely useful Python utilities by Peter Norvig
A Square Is Not A Rectangle
this would probably be better titled "ask pg". he's probably the only one who can [reasonably] help you.
A commenter

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/nanosolar-solar-powe...

makes an interesting point about the true gains in efficiency. The second press release:

http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/nrel-certifies-164-nan...

states:

"In terms of our current baseline production process, our best production rolls now achieve higher than 11% median efficiency measured as equivalent to panel efficiency, with very tight cross- and down-web uniformity."
Looking at what he was doing (Python + C++) it seems that switching was a no brainer. Hell, I'm a MS fanboy (seriously love .NET) and I use Linux for some projects (Java/Tomcat and investigating Mono).
Right, but even then that's small right?
ITunes and Cocoa
For Entrepreneurs, Every Day is Game Day
Functionally, Google has replaced DNS for most people.
Clickable: http://weegoh.com
I have a simpler dictum: Square was-a Rectangle. In other words, we wish to implement a square using the rectangle class, but we do not acknowledge that a square is a rectangle at all. Implementation inheritance should sometimes be independent of interface inheritance.

If I was forced to use interface inheritance for this, I would say that both squares and rectangles are abstract quadrangles, but rectangles allow individual sides to be set and squares do not.
All these Rails clones! They think they can just ape Rails' idioms and then they'll have the power of Ruby's metaprogramming at their disposal and -- oh, wait.
>>>You could try to bend all the devs into the MS way of doing things with complex tools and large solutions. Or you could attempt to make tools that fit a modern developer.

Yes, yes, yes. Agreed. Scott guthrie and crew are doing good work here, but we clearly have a long way to go. Thanks for this honest feedback.
For the life of me I can't find the sql connection in arc, would you help me find it ;) ?

http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar

Personally I think releasing that data is a bad idea. It might help people to game the system and it might inadvertently release more than intended, see:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets...
Beginner Solution to the Rubik's Cube
If you have to reboot Windows for anything other than updates you should be looking into problems with your hardware and drivers. The "Windows is unstable" meme should really be dead and buried by now.

I can believe Ubuntu is faster than Windows at booting, especially considering they focused on it in their last release, but for me the much bigger issue was flaky Sleep/Suspend-to-RAM and Hibernate/Suspend-to-Disk support. I suspend my laptop several times a day but only reboot on updates.
Chris Sacca's under 40, right?

If so, I would consider him to be a counter-example.
51% of newspaper executives think they can charge for online content
Except even MonoTouch presumably just has .NET bindings for UIKit, in much the same way there is Cocoa# for writing GUI mac apps with Mono. The difference here is mainly AOT compilation for ARM plus some different system bindings and maybe an optimised memory footprint.

The GUI library issue is the same on all platforms really. No matter what language you're using, the interface is going to be a wrapper for the underlying System API, which is either a C, C++, or Objective-C library.
Advisor stock? That's an enormous conflict of interest for a editor at news ("news"?) organization covering the space.
Standing in the Way of Culture
A few data points extracted from the slides by the author that I also found interesting:

- Seventy percent of core loyalists online are also readers of the print edition (meaning they subscribe or they picked up a copy in the past seven days).

- Newspaper sites made next to no revenue from behaviorally targeted ads or local search advertising in 2008.

- Classified advertising accounts for 16% to 22% of online revenue for newspapers, though that’s expected to decline this year.
Maybe I'm missing something, but who develops on Windows for applications that aren't using the Windows APIs anyway? I mean, the whole point of Windows is it's APIs. If you aren't going to use them, then sure, go and move to a unix system - indeed you should have done so years ago.

On the other hand, if your product is designed for Windows, then you can't really switch, can you? (that's a real question by the way, not rhetorical).
I have found the kubuntu KDE4 a bit flaky and font-poor (especially the earlier versions). I run KDE4 at home from the gentoo repository and it is rock solid and the fonts are fine, so I am not sure what is going on there.

A bit beside the point as I would not recommend switching to gentoo as your first linux distro (or even for most people)
Google Wave - I want an elevator pitch
To make a better world, legalise drugs
DNS squatters are using very sophisticated algorithms feeding from Google Trends and hot words in blogs or mainstream media. Forget about getting a domain on something not obscure.
Configuring GoDaddy DNS & Heroku Screencast
I think there are many people who might be curious about the statistical properties

I am also :)
I'm probably an outlier here at hn, but I feel fortunate to have been born into the religion of my parents and grandparents, which is perfectly suited to my "hacker" mindset. It incorporates a system of thinking and lifelong learning along with an understanding that there is still that which is bigger than ourselves.

I won't say any more than that because these kinds of discussions at hn quickly devolve into something other than what was intended. I do answer emails.
I am not sure the game-the-system argument is strong. I could write a scraper to get the same data I am requesting in about 20 minutes. I cannot speak for other members, but I personally would want a karma dump to see if I can improve the algorithm. It is already pretty robust against abuses, but I think it could be improved as far as ranking goes.
Okay now I am curious which langauge you wanted that wasn't there... there's like a 100 languages on that list, half of which I haven't even heard of ("Brainfuck"???)
@Mentions/Tagging just went live on Facebook
The Elevator Pitch is Dead. Enter The Twitter Pitch.
OS X has Adobe CS and Microsofts Office. That solves most SW availability problems, atleast for me. And even World of Warcrack runs for those poor addicts. And iTunes is quite popular too, which is missing from Linux, and is available in OS X.