skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article just spurred a thought about our health care crisis.

How are they connected? Debt enabled consumers to pay more for products, so the price of the product increased. They could pay more, because the monthly payments were low -- even for very large mortgages.

The same thing happens in the stock market. One of the original reasons the stock market collapsed before the great depression was that traders were over leveraged. You could leverage up 10x back then.

This level of leverage is possible today in the commodities market and I predict a similar collapse of the commodities market due to this. We saw a little of this as oil speculators deleveraged their holdings.

Back to health care. Health insurance enables large expenditures of health care costs for a low monthly payment. Because consumers can buy large amounts of health care for not a lot of money, they spend more, doctors spend more, hospitals spend more.

Insurance companies cut out the tumor of debt by canceling the insurance plans for those who over extend themselves and cost the insurance company more than their monthly payments can afford.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I suppose a) health care bubble fueled by low monthly payments. b) collapse of health care bubble will reduce innovation in health care industry. c) insurance companies will over extend themselves and increase risk for shareholders and the insured...

I don't know, just something that popped into my mind that seems to be a common pattern here...
Very interesting. Apparently we can make images clearer by shifting the red half a pixel to the left and the blue half a pixel to the right (very roughly speaking; I know there is more to it than that).

What's up with that? Can anyone find/give an explanation of this phenomenon?

EDIT: This guy Miha is amazing. Check out this tiny little font he is working on (go to nearly the bottom of the page for a more complete version):

http://typophile.com/node/61920
Parameterized queries effectively pre-compile the syntax of the query, and pass the parameters out of band (you can see that on the wire in the TSQL or MySQL protocols --- the parameters are actually seperate messages).

The net effect is, there's no opportunity to mix query structure and parameter, because by the time the database looks at user input, it's already fixed the query structure in place.

You do not get the same benefit by aggressively quoting; among other things:

* Quoting can fall to character set attacks

* You still may need to handle truncation

* Different quoting regimes are required for different parameter types

It's possible to safely do concatenated sanitized SQL (ActiveRecord does it), it's just hard. It's also possible to have injectable parameterized queries, or even injectable stored procedures (for instance, if the procedure uses dynamic SQL). There's no panacea.
Damn…
Hate to sound pedantic, but the Java example is a little off. java.sql.PreparedStatements have their parameters start at index 1, not 0. So the first "?" is parameter 1 and the second is parameter 2.

It's one of the few places in Java where indexing starts at 1 instead of 0.
Google to deliver 'government cloud' to feds in 2010
Archos 5 Internet Tablet makes an honest PMP out of Android
Evolution works in spurts. We are spurt of evolution as long as our environment is changing, which it has constantly been for the last 40,000 years.
Structured data: top web trends of 2009
The problem with relying solely on "real world makefiles" is that there is not a lot of variation amongst those that are publicly accessible. The vast majority of open source projects that use make are autoconf based, which means the makefiles are all more-or-less the same, except that the list of source files and the project name change. Once you can successfully build one of these, you can probably build all of them.

There are a handful projects that don't follow this pattern, such as Mozilla, but once you've built those they cease to be useful for flushing out new bugs.

So, what do you do once you've built all the open source projects you can find, and you are still finding incompatibilities in your parser when you go to customers? Markov chain-based makefiles are a reasonable way to extend the breadth of our testing. Obviously it's not the only thing we do, but it is another valuable tool to add to the toolbox.
Exactly. I don't think there is an equivalence between server code and client code. There are some things you just can't trust the client to do, so there will always have to be server code to do it. Whether that code is in a web server, a framework, a database, it doesn't matter. Someone has to write it.

However, I could see some of the code, such as the code that actually builds the page the users sees, being pushed into the browser. But then, don't we already have that with XML and XSLT (or whatever?)
The Best Deal In Startup Land
Mike Arrington's celebsession
Those who saw Penn & Teller @ TC50, don't you think that was a waste of stage time which could have been given to a much deserving startup (I can name at least 10 of them from the DemoPit)?
World's older person dies? Why does this keep happening?! This trend is frightening.
Beyond the cool factor of the robot itself, the article makes a great point about the need for something more advanced than Lego Mindstorms, but practical for an enthusiastic hobbyist.

The author uses an analog to the App store, but Linux is probably a better reference. Are there open source possibilities for robotics?

How would you frame it? People could work on sub components? Do you have a RoboFair to show off what has been built? Have a more participatory kind of BattleBots event?

In any case it is a cool opportunity to have intelligent roboticists have an outlet for their work that is more additive than the YouTube video that will be passed around tech blogs and ultimately forgotten.
U.K. Startups Face Crisis as Venture Funding, Deals Dry Up
This is the sort of thing that CrowdFlower does automatically, except it takes the quality control aspect to a new level. It takes into account the history of the worker (were they accurate workers in the past? etc.) and also handles automatically rejecting workers who fail too many gold questions.

Speaking of, that's one of the cool bits about CrowdFlower, too, is that you can define "gold" questions. These are questions to which you know the answer. Workers will see these as if they were any other task. We then give them feedback about how well they're doing. If they keep missing the gold questions, then we mark all of their work for your job as "tainted" and their answers don't go into the aggregate calculations, which tell you what the users agreed on the most.

So, for instance, in a job where we pull in tweets about, say, #kanyewest, and ask workers to judge the sentiment of the tweet (positive, negative, etc.), we could take some obvious ones, like "Kanye West is a big jerk!" and mark it as gold with an answer of "Negative". Anyone who says "Positive" is probably yanking your chain. So we trust them less.

Of course, gold questions don't work too well for subjective questions, like writing short paragraphs.

I hope this gives you an idea of what CrowdFlower does in terms of Quality Control. I'm only the front-end guy, so I'm not too knowledgeable about all the math behind the scenes. All I know is that there's lots of it. :)

(I'm a front-end developer for CrowdFlower. I don't represent the company's views. Except in regards to bacon. I represent those.)
It says "all objects of the same constructor", which can be losslessly translated to "all objects with the same prototype that were created using JavaScript's retarded way of trying to look kind of like a class-based OO language when really it's not at all".

It's rather "expanded using knowledge about Javascript object model plus subjective opinion about JS being retarded" than "losslesly translated".

Given that said knowledge is the knowledge that the slides are meant to convey, we have some circular reasoning here.
I'm curious what Similar Posts is going to be. Something like StumbleUpon for links?
Novel way to cool data centers passes first test
would you not say the same thing for google, aol, facebook, etc.? all well established companies that don't need the stage time at tc50.

i think the point of giving stage time to big players and famous people is at least a reasonably smart idea that lifts the overall media coverage level of the entire event, benefiting all companies that present or are in the pit.
Interactive Timeline: How the patent system has shaped US history
I'm very curious about the move to shared nothing storage. Could any future blog psots be made on that topic?
Content moderation is one of the things that CrowdFlower does really well -- and yes, you can have workers search for adult content (At least on Mechanical Turk. I'm not sure about our other labor pools. In any case, you can definitely use CrowdFlower for filtering out adult content.)

You'll probably want to make sure your job description mentions that, though!

(I'm a front-end developer for CrowdFlower. I don't represent the company's views. Except in regards to bacon. I represent those.)
Ask HN: Is Arrington going to debut the CrunchPad At TechCrunch50?
Just wanted to see if anyone else was wondering this. Any bets on whether or not it will happen?

It makes perfect sense for it to happen today why call a separate event when you've already got everyone there and thousands watching live online.
Good luck finding something that the mere existence of an algorithm with a sub-exponential complexity could contradict.

And I didn't state that proving a negative is impossible, just that it's completely different from proving a positive by example and unlikely to benefit from failed attempts to find such an example.
Please. The worlds oldest person dies every couple of weeks. The next oldest person is 114 now, I don't give that person much longer to live and I'm not in any way knowledgeable about their state of health, it simple statistics.
Banks too big to fail, now even biggerer
How-to stop most people from spidering your site and stealing content
IMo presentation, Live From TechCrunch50
Hmm,

The whole description seems satisfyingly low tech. The engine is carburetted rather than fuel-injected but it claims a higher power to weight ratio than a Vyron.

It's interesting that this company's nearly hand-made cars cost only three times the cost of a factory made Toyota ("Our cars start at $56,995 for the 427 models and $61,995 for the 289 models"). I would have imagined that the ratio was much more - a hand-made Pentium would set you back a lot more than 3X the cost of a factory built one.
Anniversary Bands
Over the years, rings and bands have remained as the symbols of eternal love and giving. They have signified the belonging and care that is accompanied by a soul mate through the thick and thin of life.
Does anyone really consider WiMAX to be 4G, except for Sprint? Most American carriers have bet on LTE, which has a theoretical max of ~170 Mbps.

Whether Verizon and AT&T can keep their deployment schedule (2013 and 2011, respectively), is another question, but at least they were smart enough to avoid the band-aid that is WiMAX.
Tim O'Reilly Says Startups Don't Necesarily Need To Focus
Ha! Man, I'd love to crowdsource my laundry. :)

(I'm a front-end developer for CrowdFlower. I don't represent the company's views. Except in regards to bacon. I represent those.)
A hand-made Pentium would be impossible to make, just like much other modern tech where building the tools and process to create the end product is more important and costly than the actual end product.

What I'd like to know is how much this custom made car cost.
Actually, at my department (a "top-10" school for CS), for each course we TA, we're expected to write at least one problem set and come up with at least one question for each exam given. There are also half-courses on intro to Unix or intro to C++ that are taught entirely by grad students.

I suspect the OP was teaching an intro-level course, designed to get freshmen up to speed on basic linear algebra, filling any gaps they might have had in their high school curriculum.
Check Please: How to Learn About Your Clients From Their Table Manners
While this is no doubt useful, its hilarious that something that actually removes a feature from your computer is being billed as "the most wonderful software ever invented." (not by you, by someone quoted on their homepage.)
TechCrunch50 Business Model Review
My hack: run bittorrent during work time. Every site gets a lot slower. For me, the increase in latency makes distractions less enjoyable, but full access is still there if I really need it. On a few occasions, I've found important work-related stuff on HN.
Would have been nice if he posted something of substance rather than just nitpick. Does anyone know an actual reason why he didn't just work with the folks making pshb(other than the one BradF insinuates)?
Don't worry, I'll be making some technical blog posts down the road explaining in excruciating detail exactly how I've done the federated architecture.
Except that in practice, it hardly ever happened until very recently. Ethnic groups lived far apart, and those folks who lived near a boundary between two different ethnic groups would hardly ever interbreed with the others (whether that's mostly cultural or a lack of attraction, though, I'm not sure). Even now, it happens surprisingly infrequently.
It is an old concept that got ignored somewhere along the road to java. Inheritance for the sake of implementation is called WAS_A. In C++, this is what private inheritance does. In languages like Java and Ruby, WAS-A is often implemented using delegation, so that a square HAS-A rectangle.
Get Vonda N. McIntyre's sci-fi classic Dreamsnake for free
>>>Fair use would protect your ability to use the software, and to make backup archival copies of the physical CD for use in case the original breaks.

Is that true? It was my impression that (at least in the US) those are not explicit fair uses. Is there a case on point?
Come on, bring out your romantic war stories. Tell us about your favourite epic one-liner.
I think about money going into my bank account. Makes the distractions seem more expensive (I'm currently salaried and it still works).
I didn't say JS was retarded, I said the particular way it tries to look like a class-based OO language even though it isn't was retarded.

Given that you were critiquing #67 as though you thought you already understood the information, I felt it was fair game to call you out for being wrong about it. Apologies.
The book binding is awesome in and of itself... This particular example is a bit extreme, but if your going to make a physical book, make it worthwhile!
They are part of the Code, but courts test what the code means all the time. Example: before the Sony Betamax case, there were the statutory provisions of fair use, but it was unclear how it applied to home taping.
This blocking strategy is so naive it's not even funny.

Your best (or most fanatic) users will be blocked and the smart bot operators will get through.

Better to adopt a more sophisticated strategy.

- send a cookie with the request, make sure it's present on
subsequent requests

- embed other media in your pages and check that they are fetched too (make sure these can't be cached)

- put a list of all known tor exit nodes and open proxies in a DB somewhere and check against that. You could use IP tables for this or you can handle it in your application layer

- put some velocity controls in that aim to make it expensive to fetch sequential ids if your site is set up like that.

- sprinkle your site with unclickable links that link to trigger pages that block the ip, or if you want to go sophisticated on your wannabe spiderers store the ip in a database and from then on whenever that IP connects spout complete garbage in large pages that link to other garbage pages. This will cost you some bandwidth though, if your bandwidth costs are lower than the perps this will at some point lead to a reduction in bot activity.

- keep checks on the user agents, anything with 'bot' in it that is not on a permitted list can get the same treatment, a list of url fetching libraries is also handy.
Sounds like a very good refinement of the reputation score in MTurk. For example, I usually only request workers with 95%+ acceptance rates.

The "Gold questions" sound like another refinement of the tests you can give Turks: if you have an image processing task, you can require that a worker pass a series of tests and effectively become certified before attempting your job. Are you guys trying to replace that system or complement it?
I just concocted a message on okcupid with almost all these phrases and I got a reply in 30 minutes. It works.
Ultimate car is imho bit of an overstatement, but it's still extremely nice craftsmanship.
Bigger share of the total != bigger.
I made a 'sub-pixel accuracy scrolling' demo once on the Gameboy Color: one half of the screen scrolling at 1 pixel a frame, the other at 1/3 pixels. Amazing how jarring the normal scrolling looks once you get used to the sub-pixel smoothness.
It doesn't "specifically" say that. If you read the Betamax case, it's clear that the court was looking at the intrinsic qualities of home video taping devices. Time shifting, for example, isn't really an issue with back ups, recorded music, or books. That's not to say that the Betamax case isn't very persuasive when it comes to fair use with other media, but it's not explicit that the holding in that case would apply to other media.
3D worlds rendered in the cloud straight to your browser
Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users and is Cash Flow Positive
It's from a phenomenon known as chromatic aberration which is a characteristic of lenses, including the one in your eye (more so if you have astigmatism).

Have you ever looked at someone silhouetted by a bright light, and noticed color fringing on the left and right sides? That's the reason (if you haven't, you have very good eyes). It's also something you often see on photos from cheap digital cameras, where it is introduced by cheap lenses shining onto tiny sensors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration

Interestingly, if you look at the typophile page through a vertically-oriented prism, you'll see similar color fringing on both images - the giant red and white 'pixels' in authentic favicon will shift towards...yellow and purple. Make sure you are looking through the second rotation of the prism - the first rotation does not induce color fringing but reverses left and right instead.

edit: Also, someone should hire that guy, like now.
Quarterlife Magazine
F15 International Contributors Comprise this Primer Quarterlife Publication with Feature Articles from Famine to Fashion. Representing those in their Quarterlife in their own words.
I really like Tcl/Tk, and I hope anyone wanting to hack together a quick GUI interface gives it a try!
1:35,200 Scale Train is World’s Smallest
GitHub Departs Engine Yard for Rackspace
yes, but they all cost way more than mindstorms.
There's http://dabuttonfactory.com for that.
I don't have an Epic one-liner but back in the day we used Vignette StoryServer with Tcl as the scripting language. By some weird tweak that AFAIK was unique to that system in order to escape a square bracket in a string we had to add 2^x backslashes for however many square brackets deep we were. So you'd end up with something like

puts " page \\\\\\\\\\[8]"
Disclaimer: I'm by no means an operating systems expert. I am simply a computer engineering student who has recently written my own OS, from scratch.

First things first, limit your scope! All of those links seem to want to tell you how to write an OS to run on a standard PC. That is going to be a huge nightmare. Presumably, you'll want to be able to access some (or all) of the peripherals on your PC, so you'll have to write drivers for them, which is incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, write for a smaller platform with simple peripherals. Something like a Gumstix, or ARM development board. You should be able to easily get documentation for each hardware component.

Second, don't try to mimic Linux. It may seem appealing because Linux is great, but its underlying architecture isn't. Linux has a monolithic kernel, meaning that there is a lot of functionality in there. If your display code gets into a bad state, it can bring the entire system down. It's also not very fun to manage the interface when you have 250+ system calls.

Instead of a monolithic kernel, use a microkernel structure. In a microkernel, you essentially have basic scheduling, inter-process communication, and memory management. Everything else lives outside of the kernel in separate processes, which communicate via message passing. This makes it much more stable, since there's a smaller chance of the entire system being taken down. It's also a lot easier to have your OS certified (essential if you want to use it in industrial or safety-critical scenarios) when it's broken down into small pieces.

Third, you'll have to read up on scheduling algorithms, context switching (this will require knowledge of assembly for your chosen platform), memory management and concurrency. Those are just the bare minimum for a working OS!

Fourth, get some partners for your project. Writing an OS is a lot of work, and your friends will help to encourage you. They'll also help to prevent you from making silly design decisions.

Good luck!
vab@mit.edu

It would be nice if it's in Cambridge or Boston proper. I suspect many people who would attend would also go to something like Mass. Innovation Nights. But, those are all the way out in Waltham, MA. So, I never go. There's a lot of start-up/opensource stuff out on 128 that I never go to.
This might be of questionable ethics, but if you put his twitter handle here, anyone googling for him will without a doubt come across your description. Google loves HN. Mention it on another high-traffic web site?

Send him an email warning him before with a chance to come clean or repair the damage he's done. Also, don't threaten; just write "I will post this on date X, and I'd like to hear your side of the story before then."
Ask HN: UI Suggestions/Guidelines for premium/up-sell(balancing act) ?
Does anyone have suggestions relating to up-selling premium features.
I'm specifically interested in hearing thoughts on balancing the need to make the premium feature discoverable and the need to make sure that users don't get annoyed by the premium-feature ad within their app.

I'm looking for generic guidelines. So it doesn't matter whether you have experience relating to premium features on a "free" website or in-app purchase features in an iPhone app or premium features in some other platform.(Of course, examples from any particular platform will be welcome)

Experience (as a developer) selling premium features will be valuable. Experience as a user who has seen premium feature ads will also be useful.
Echo Server in Twisted Matrix:

from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor

class Echo(protocol.Protocol):
def dataReceived(self, data):
self.transport.write(data)

if __name__ == '__main__':
factory = protocol.ServerFactory()
factory.protocol = Echo
reactor.listenTCP(8000,factory)
reactor.run()
Adobe To Acquire Omniture For Approximately $1.8 Billion
Scala Vs Clojure – Let’s get down to business
How good are your eyes? - I am curious about whether you have had them tested and if so what visual acuity score you received. It might very well be your vision is abnormally sharp and the colors are a distraction.
certainly the ycombinator clones are interesting and may even begin to make a difference. But, if the value proposition of ycombinator is essentially PGs talent, help, and networking, how much can the knockoffs really give you.

That being said, as with the author, it is even more clear to me ycombinator itself is the best deal out there
300 Million and On
Thanks to simple statistics (and the biological immortality old age endows), any given world's oldest person has an expected incumbency of about two years.