skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think radiation oncology is going to be displaced by emerging disciplines in medicine. I would pay close attention to what is happening in the field of immunotherapy since there are a lot of recent success in difficult cancers, autoimmune diseases, and infections. Recently several specialists have supported immunotherapy's potential in cancer treatment (http://www.nature.com/nature/outlook/cancer-immunotherapy/). Unfortunately, training in radiation oncology will most likely be different than the training required to perform this type of medicine. Likewise, the potential for automation/technology/AI in this particular field is quite limited.

It's important to think about why medicine might be moving away from radiological therapies. They are poorly tolerated by patients and expensive (http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/radiation-therapy-...). It's difficult to say what will happen in the next couple of years, but radiology in general is taking a hit since hospitals are trying to limit the use of expensive and unnecessary imaging often at the expense of radiology professionals (http://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=dis...). Choosing a career path in medicine should be more about how you like interacting with patients.
What about the concerns of the actual people who live there, rather than the midwesterners who will be out there for the 5-10 years to start their career or figure out that they're not cut out for computers, then move either back home or somewhere that isn't a horrible place to live because it's covered in high-density housing?
Ask HN: Anyone to coach me as a startup creator?
Hi Hners,

I've been working on many startup ideas full-time for 14 months now. I've learned a lot during the process, I failed a lot too. I am now working on a great idea (all of them was but this one is greater ;) ) and I would really like to make that one a success. This one deserve it as it would really help people. The idea is about creating a passive internet (no input required) so people with no computer skills and who can't learn anymore could communicate with their over-geeky relatives. Imagine your 80+ year old grandmother receiving Facebook posts, SMS or Skype like calls.

I am solo entrepreneur and I feel like a few good "chirurgical" advices might be sufficient to unlock the first steps to success.

Anthony
The end of neighbours
I don't see why you need an i7. I have a passively-cooled Celeron NUC (Zotac CI320) that's fine for web browsing and 'productivity'. It gets hotter than I'd like though.
So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well, since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit location falling nearer to a milepost.
I said ANSI-capable. I also assumed the terminal dimensions are either fixed or can be retrieved somehow, e.g. from the environment or via an ioctl like in Unixy systems.

So TIOCGWINSZ for the dimensions. And printf("\033[7m") to get a background for the box (you can use colors too, though I think they're mostly fugly). printf("\033[2J") to clean the screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_sequence

Using an API wrapping the database of terminal incompatibility might've been a good idea in the days of hardwired glass terminals. But nowadays it can cause more problems than it solves, plus it's ugly as hell. Also, we now have standards and emulators to rely on for when you can't otherwise adapt.

Try get to your shell on an older Solaris box connecting via rxvt-unicode. Oh, missing a terminfo entry? That's easy (if you know how to add it, as a user). But, wait, the name of the terminal is too long! So all applications which rely on curses or term(info|crap) will give you grief. Even though all terminals (terminal emulators really) people use these days support a reasonable subset of the ANSI escape codes -- and when they don't, you can run something like GNU screen between your terminal and the application. Things would just work if applications assumed a standard and didn't rely on a huge database and thousands of lines of code to deal with it.
The Southeast Asia-Japan cable links 8 countries, not just Singapore to Japan, and is nearly as long, with options to extend the total span to longer than the Japan-US cable.
Further, there is value in knowing what makes the incorrect ways incorrect. :)

Also, even in the article it noted to use a library if your language allows.
I saw MikeyD's tech talk on fixing healthcare.gov on my second-to-last day at Google; it made me very glad that I'd pushed out my end date until mid-week. The key idea in it was just the idea of "show up and try" - that we have all these broken systems because the people with the skills to fix them won't even show up and try. Very inspiring - I thought that it very much demonstrated the entrepreneurial mindset, even if it was the federal government we were talking about.

I think this may also be evidence of a trend I've pointed out before, that the press is reliably 2 years late in pointing out where people are leaving Google to go to. I used to periodically glance at the list of departures back when I was at Google. Around late 2012 or mid 2013 I saw a lot more folks start to go into public-sector work: non-profits, academia, or government service. Overall a positive trend, I think.
Show HN: Visualize user behaviour with heatmap.js
What's really funny is the AirBnb hosts often will not let you stay 30 days, but are fine with it if you have a day missing, then book another thirty. So the hosts understand and fight really hard to prevent anyone from possibly being considered a tenant which would give them more protections under the law. If it weren't for that I'd say, yay, AirBnb, help us make more efficient use of our housing. But really it is very prejudiced against long term residency in practice, so it is really choosing a certain type of tenant and taking long term housing off market.
I used to absolutely love the Mac version back in the early 90s. Odd that the Windows version was so appalling.
Fixing chess: One game developer's redesign of a 1,500-year-old game
I posted the NY Times link. The WaPo article to which 'dang links (which I hadn't seen) goes into more depth and seems to do a better job.

The respective headlines undoubtedly made a difference in upvotes here -- the NYT headline, which referenced an ex-Googler, is now near the top of the HN front page, while the (better) WaPo article, posted a few minutes earlier but which didn't mention the SV connection, is languishing with just 1 point. [EDIT: I just upvoted it; it still has just 2 points.]
At the very least, this suffers from false equivalence: clearly "running betting pools" and "selling Tupperware or Avon" (!) are not in same class as "going to a medical or dental appointment" or "running to the cafeteria for a snack". I think it's also somewhat dastardly that he's tacked on "griping about working conditions" and put it in same category as a personal indulgence that should not be enjoyed on "company time" -- it makes for an easy way of shutting down legitimate and constructive criticism.

In terms of how things have changed since WordPerfect: there is simply not the clearcut distinction between one's personal life and one's company life that there once was. This cuts both ways: yes, some "company time" is used for personal activities (like, um, eating), but plenty of formerly personal time is now used for the company. ("Dad: stop reading your e-mail!") The only path forward is to be reasonable adults about this: the world has become more complicated, and employees should strive to do right by the company -- and companies should strive to do right by employees. Flexibility and empathy are rewarded with increased productivity and improved morale; rigidity like that displayed here has been obsoleted.
"Some thirty-year scenarios… 1) Intelligence Debilitated (with no new social contract of trust and thus the loss of new talent, the government cannot keep up with advancing technology and loses the ability to manage its hazards); 2) Withering Nation (privacy obsession hampers commercial activity and government oversight, and nations develop their own conflicting Internets); 3) Intelligent America (new social contract with agreed privacy norms and ongoing security assurance)."

Given the 9/11 CYA response and a lack of evidence that anything the NSA does is effective, I don't see the downside of #1 or the upside of #3.

#2 presumes only the nation-state can protect business and the internets. I think the multi-nationals have moved on, and the masses will too.
True. You are right about that. Here is what I wanted to do further, there are tasks that we want to do on a particular day. In other words, something to remember and becomes active on a day. Like my important task on Month beginning would be: "Prepare billing. Finalize last month timesheet". A task template to automate the task generation/creation/assignment. Oh! I am sure, there are lot to do there. It is interesting as always. All the best. ;)
Ask HN: Finding data science and analysis contract work
Background: I am an entrepreneur with a relatively successful, small, first-year consulting firm. In addition to running the day-to-day business and selling, I constantly want to grow my knowledge and keep challenging myself with the next set of in-demand skills. I have worked with databases/SQL for almost 10 years and am six months into learning R.

Goal: I would like to find additional work in data analysis and data science fields, but am unsure where to look. Contract work is preferable - I have tried oDesk and Elance in the past but was disappointed in the listings and expected pay. I love staying busy and much of my current gig is cyclical, so I want to prepare for any downturns.

Question: What's the best advice for beginning the search for contract work? Is it worth reaching out to local recruiters in the area as a "consultant"? Get back on oDesk and do some small jobs? Browse Kaggle constantly for the white whale?
This was my first thought as well. Is he hiring? As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.
It doesn't change the context, it clarifies it: not just an asshole, but one who refused to assume his assholery.
Have we really? There seems to be a lot of this very sort of push back against higher-level languages like Haskell & Scala.

I just recently debated a colleague on the merits of AltJS languages. He's of the opinion that Javascript is all we need and is happy to be a "Javascript assembly programmer" for the foreseeable (and perhaps unforeseeable) future.
Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
> The new data is more reliable, Carré said, for three reasons: the Peruvian coast is strongly affected by El Niño; the shells record ocean temperature, which is the most important parameter for the El Niño cycles; and the ability to record seasonal changes, the timescale at which El Niño can be observed.

Emphasis mine. I'm kind of curious how the shells encode that temperature information. Growth speed? Chemical changes?
Yes. The SF Bay used to be surrounded by marshland but huge parts of it got landfilled and paved over. Turns out that leads to big problems with flooding etc. so most of the few wetlands that are left are now protected areas.
De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting for them.

Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).
Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geer
Fashion Photographer Brad Triffitt
Yes, that's right - and it can be a different audience as well (i.e. not everyone you communicate with on a daily basis will be on your email subscription list and vice-versa) - we see it as a great way to expose more people to your brand (and for most companies would see the messages being about content/brand building rather than pure advertising.
"While running a business profitably is arguably as difficult as any other profession, almost anyone is allowed to give it a try, whether they are qualified or not. It is like an inalienable right, available even to the foolish, the young, and the senile."
My favorite quote.
There is plenty of bloat in modern systems, so we do seem to have overcome that worry in the average programmer's mindset.

There is a significant difference between the asm/C jump and the C/managed jump though- even though early C compilers had a performance penalty, the C language semantics are very amenable to optimization and the cases where you could do better in asm are pretty rare.

Your typical dynamically typed, garbage collected scripting language, on the other hand, is not very nice to optimize. It may be "good enough," but there's plenty of good reasons people still start new projects in C++, and there's a reason for the recent resurgence of more static languages like Go, Julia, Swift, Rust, etc.
People interested in DIY neuroscience might also be interested in the SpikerBox [1] and associated neuroscience course [2]. Although not in the same vein as the OpenBCI, it provides a hacker-friendly way to learn about principles in neuroscience and explore at your own pace.

[1] https://backyardbrains.com/products/spikerbox
[2] http://mcb80x.org
Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house.

My 1br in MV is $2700, and it's not even high end.
Just to save people the click, it is triclosan again. This story has been resurfacing for at least the last few YEARS but yet it is still on the market.

I for one have moved to a triclosan free liquid hand soap but a lot of toothpastes continue to contain it.
I currently scrap my lending club account to automatically trade loan notes on the secondary market. This way I can buy/sell notes that satisfy my criteria. If anyone is interested in this, I can send you the scripts.
I'm using pass[1] for storing all my passwords using GPG. All my passwords are generated randomly to include capitalized letters, numbers and symbols at a lenght of 32.

Example: vKP5M['SJo%Y~4r~`Fu$^39W_5:N^[R$

Furthermore, the password store is syntronized to my raspberry pi (acting as a home server, among many things) using git and a private bitbucket repo so I can easily SSH into it from iOS in order to get a password.

I find this way of managing my passwords both highly secure and pretty convinient, given a terminal window is always within my reach.

[1]http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/
The rise of machines that learn
Were the Teen Choice Awards rigged?
That's funny because the only reason I buy Colgate Total is because it's the only toothpaste with triclosan.
I think for this kind of work $5k is already too much for three Chinese workers. Each worker about $500 and maybe some fees for the living room and food. If you pay $2k it might be fine.

If you pay $5k for such kind of 24/7 job in China you'll make a middle man very happy.
Mikey was my manager for a while. Great guy. I advised him to figure out how to make an impact while his brand was hot, and this is what he ended up deciding on. I hear he doesn't even have to wear a suit all the time, either.
It's amazing in some ways, but I'm concerned it held Windows back to maintain such a high level of reverse compatibility for so long.
I say this without any knowledge of the profitability of such a venture, and as someone who does not live in Australia but who is familiar with the running joke that they have poor Internet:

How about run a new cable, or two, to Australia?
McSema: Static Translation of X86 Instructions to LLVM [pdf]
That sounds like a place where I wouldn't have wanted to work.
For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
Apple's App Store is just... Horrendous.

That thing needs a massive re-working. There are plenty of us who have released apps, games that were great, only to be buried by apps that were terrible.

The cream definitely doesn't rise to the top using the current App Store model.

It's just a fricken lottery at this point.
No flag, no country..you can't have one.

Thats the rules that I've just made up and I'm backing it up with this gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEx5G-GOS1k
Thanks. OP wasn't interested in Windows. I have never been either, so I didn't even know. Thanks for the info.

Regarding the small files performance - thanks for pointing it out. We are using Bacula to backup JIRA & Confluence data stored directly on the disk as files. Some customers have thousands of small attachments in their instances. I haven't seen any performance problems though. Maybe because not only there need to be thousands of small files, but also they need to change often, which is not a case for us. Will keep this in mind. Thanks.
I can't help but have a strongly negative opinion of anybody who would use this service.

IMO implementing algorithms is what computer programming and software development are all about. It's the fun part of the job. A person buying an algorithm as a web service makes me wonder why the person even became a software engineer at all.

Not to mention that if this idea takes off, it will ruin it for the rest of us by encouraging algorithm researchers to patent new algorithms and not publish them.

I do wonder, though, if a person won't look for a freely available, openly published algorithm, why would they look at this service for an algorithm they have to pay for?
Ripple/Stellar isn't a scam becaues of the pre-mine. It's a scam because it isn't the decentralized system it claims to be.
What's the advantage of having poor people living in the city?

Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference.

Or is it advantageous to the poor, so that they too can stand in line for a $70 bottomless mimosa brunch every Sunday or buy some nice eighteen-buck cocktails? No, that's stupid, the poor would be better off in a poorer city where (a) everything is cheaper, and (b) they don't have to suffer the indignity of being constantly surrounded by people much more successful than themselves.

No poor people live in Beverley Hills, and it works out just fine for them.
Looking Back at Our Ridiculous 3.5-inch iPhone Displays
I've worked with OCRed PDFs, the main thing that should be obvious is that OCR results range from poor to horrendous. It takes a lot of manual cleanup if a high degree of accuracy is required. Or depending on why you want the text, you can adjust expectations or add layers of software such as fuzzy search algorithms to deal with the issues.

Again depending on the application, the mixed quality of OCR isn't always a deal breaker, but it's not always as simple as it might appear.
I am sold.

Is anyone in Vancouver hiring? Perhaps there needs to be a "Who's hiring in Vancouver" thread, along with information on whether they will hire non-Canadians / non-Americans stuck in the Valley due to the immigration limbo.
BadUSB – On accessories that turn evil [pdf]
It was intended to be a very simple pomodoro timer with variable times as some tasks are better divided into different increments (it was also an excuse to write a jquery plugin which I'd not done before).

I will keep an eye out :).
It's not the text that's the issue, it's the structure. PDFs have nowhere near as much structure as markup. You end up having to do this for dozens of layouts and it gets hurty really fast:

http://schoolofdata.org/2013/06/18/get-started-with-scraping...
I wonder how much effort they've put into optimisation? Small gains (1-2% rather than order of magnitudes) for these guys obviously mean a lot more than for any bedroom operation.
The first one is Stellar Foundation. Any ideas what follows? Is one of these Square?
I don't think it's the fact that sugar is evil, but that it has been marketed as better than fat. Low fat food high in 'hidden' sugars are sold to us as better for us. Both have their issues, but looking at our diet over millennia, high sugar diets are new to our bodies.

When we bring the car into the equation and the way it has transformed the way we travel we suddenly have this health 'time' bomb that is beginning to explode.

Now people may say it's down to the individual to make dietary decisions, but this is more fundamental than this. In the same way the tobacco industry has to pay for the damage it inflicts on the population through taxation, I can see sugar taxes becoming something governments will implement to recover the cost to the state of a unhealthy population.
I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :)

I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product.

And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software.

A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten.

Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes

Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers

"A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
A sensor array along the cable line monitoring marine health would yield a data goldmine.
China does seem destined to return to its historical position as the most productive, largest market on the planet.
FTA:
"While in graduate school, Carré had developed a technique to analyze shell layers to get ocean temperatures, using carbon dating of charcoal from fires to get the year, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the growth layers to get the water temperatures as the shell was forming."
HDFS Read Caching provides 3-59x speedup
Yes, low tech things like properly washing hands can save lives, but what's even more important is public awareness and public disclosure: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/public_di...

"Rates of mortality from coronary artery bypass surgery varied widely among hospitals before the state began requiring public reporting of death rates from the procedure. Four years into mandatory reporting requirements, average hospital death rates from the operation fell by 41 percent."
The source code is released on their GitHub page at https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema