skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Nevertheless, it is important to mention that according to an influential 2001 meta-analysis comparing placebo-treatment arms with no treatment, placebos make no clinical difference.[20] However, the methodological difficulties of combining diverse conditions in a single meta-analysis are serious, and the authors’ updated meta-analysis includes more nuanced conclusions.[21] Furthermore, the meta-analyses implicitly assume the biological reductionist definition of placebo, ignoring the psychosocial context of sickness and health. The subjects in those studies were entered into a research programme and received attention and care. Therefore, in the way that the studies of the meta-analysis were actually conducted, there was plenty of room for the placebo effect without the placebo, which would spuriously suggest that the placebo was no more effective than no treatment, though in fact both had the potential to produce a placebo effect."

from "The moral case for the clinical placebo"

http://jme.bmj.com/content/40/4/219.full
Rather than linking to a book on Amazon, could you link to some peer-reviewed journal articles?
To everyone asking about logged-in access and write access: this is just a first release! Where it goes from here will depend, in good iterative fashion, on what people want.
I think someone already said it in another thread I'm not seeing now, but I have to say I've been a bit miffed about the "Blockchain" name. It was OK when they were blockchain.info, literally a few pages with public "info" about the "blockchain". Since they've added wallets in the last few years, and now with whatever they need $30M to do, it's confusing, incorrect, and maybe a bit unfair to call themselves "Blockchain."

It'd be kind of like an American payroll company calling themselves Automated Clearing House. It doesn't make sense, because ACH is actually the shared technology, not created by them, that enables them to do their work. It's unfair because people might hear about ACH transfers and think they can only be done by this one company.

blockchain.info doesn't control the Bitcoin blockchain, and they shouldn't control the name either.
Spacedeck Napkin
I think this is the first time I've seen the phrase "post Edward Snowden world", used like "post 9-11 world" has been for the last decade-plus.

I hope that catches on.

Edit: can't believe I got the name wrong. Fixed.
Same in France. I paid €5 for my fifth and last year of higher education that started this September, and I get €250/mo during 10 months to help me pay for food/housing/books. Students in more confortable situations paid 450€ and don’t get any money during the year, but that’s still pretty cheap.
Oh and if you guys build anything cool with the API, please let us know at api@ycombinator.com.
Ok, so it is less about them not specifically testing against a placebo, and more that they just do shoddy tests in the first place. I think that makes sense.
Dereferencing a null pointer (i.e. use) is undefined behavior.
I really like the idea, but at $155 this is a luxury item for people who have disposable income. Also, with the release of Apple Pay, I truly think eventually all brick and mortar businesses will support paying with your phone.
The majority of ad $ spend has been in TV. It's not because there was a credit card reader on each TV, but because there was not a better way to get that kind of wide exposure. There is tons of money transitioning from TV to other areas.
The 'delay' field has been there for years. I vaguely remember pg announcing it here when he added it, so we could probably dig up the exact date.
فاتورة التليفون الارضى معرفة فواتير التليفون المنزلى من المصرية للاتصالات الان
Academic performance doesn't seem to be an optimal measure for Adult ADHD.
This is what the book The Emperor's New Drugs is about. The idea of the book is that there was some well-known research showing that anti-depressants are effective for severe depression, but not mild or moderate cases. But if you actually only look at studies that used active placebos as controls, then there is no evidence clinical efficacy even for severe depression. Meaning that the nominal benefit for anti-depressants for severe depression that's seen in many studies is in fact probably due to people thinking they are better due to the side effects of the drug, rather than due to true drug benefits.
How they will support chip and PIN? Will they need cooperation from the issuer? If not, then they need to clone the cryptographic keys inside the chip, and I thought those were supposed to be tamper resistant.
The prospect of getting away without a wallet is exciting to me! If I could get down to just driver's license, this, and billfold, that'd be pretty cool.
And that's why all police officers are already armed with pistols.

A no-knock warrant with holstered pistols would be entirely reasonable in a residential, non-violent crime conviction, don't you think? (Well, I would debate the no-knock part :)
Reprogrammable stripes have been around for a while, and while this is a more attractive implementation the new EMV rollout (accelerated likely by the recent card breaches) will make this impractical. You can't reprogram an EMV.
The difference is that as a web developer you don't have to drop roughly ~$2k on devices to test the older versions of browsers, you just fire up a VM.

Apple developers can't roll back the OS version, and need to have at least one 4/4s, one 5/5s, and one iPad for each OS they would like to support. Let alone the new screen fragmentation.

The inability to roll back iOS is inconvenient for customers, but it's a HUGE middle-finger to developers. Customer are caught between "don't update a few of my apps" while we are caught between "don't support a number of new users" and "spend a lot of extra time and effort"
The pre-trip organisation bit is something We are working on as part of a long term goal of our new startup, Planning To (www.planning.to)

Being able to use the context of peoples existing plans and calendar/schedules to provide automated concierge type suggestions of what would suit them best in terms of travel (e.g flights, hotels etc)

Focused on B2B travel rather than vacations though for reasons others have put very well in here :)

To begin with though, we want to solve the problems inherent in calendaring/scheduling in the first place, and then build a technology platform from there that people can use to add context and automation to all sorts of use cases, travel being one of them.

Anyone interested in what we are doing would really appreciate feedback, good or bad :)
For some things ORM's get in the way, but avoiding them by your own data layer sounds like a pretty big time-suck.

Being able to write a single line of SQLAlchemy to build relationships into your models seems way simpler than implementing relationships in a custom data layer.
As someone who poured countless hours into meticulously scraping the HN markup and faces the prospect of having to port all my code with dread, I'll probably be pleading for an extension alongside you.
Also, while they don't have a Windows Phone API I previously wrote a COM Windows Scripting API to use it via Chackra from an ASP.Net app.

I think it's even easier now that JS is a supported app language.
Droopy Eyelid Detector One Solution to Truck Crashes
Could you elaborate? I assume you are criticizing HN or the complaining programmers but I can't tell which.
<pedant>

Edward.

</pedant>
The recruiter & hiring manager will appreciate you have competing demands on your schedule. It's entirely acceptable to plan phone conversations/meetings before & after normal business hours, say 6:30am coffee or 6pm conference call.
Revolutionary meaning a competitive technology edge that is very hard to copy. However, I believe it has first to solve a business problem that hurts people - who will want to use your product/service as they will find value in it, so much value that they are willing to pay and become your customers. All the best with your YC application.
Sorry yeah my bad, was in the middle of re-writing git history when this got pushed, took a few minutes to revert :) No security problems on frontend, in fact it was the parser protections which kicked in, preventing <?php from parsing etc.
Either way, they're not doing market-making.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of market perverting going on, but HFT isn't party to it.
Its Edward Snowden
They say this supports chip-and-PIN, but I don't believe them until they explain how. If I have a chip-and-PIN card from my bank, the chip has an unreadable secret used to generate one-time cryptograms to verify the authenticity of the card. There's no way to get that secret onto my Plastc card. You'd need partnerships with banks to get a new secret the way Apple Pay does. Without those, this sounds like it'll be useless once the chip-and-PIN switch happens in a year or so.
> I want to emphasize here a common misconception of 'free'.

You've blown my mind. I need to think this through carefully, but your reasoning may very well apply to health-care too.

Thanks for setting us straight. I'll be sure to vote for privitization next opportunity!

EDIT: Sarcasm!
Pre-Incorporation Startup Law
I hope they'll add an article search (by keyword) feature soon.
You are generally right, but nitpicking, bottled water is useful for: large parties; hiking and camping; certain outdoor jobs.
It goes beyond the full quote --- the whole paper is great, showing Knuth's stature as both a thinker and a writer. If you've ever quoted the "premature optimization" line to someone, or nodded when hearing it, you'd do yourself justice by understanding the context of the quote.

http://cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoT...

Here's some more from it to entice you:

My own programming style has of course changed during the
last decade, according to the trends of the times (e.g.,
I'm not quite so tricky anymore, and I use fewer go to's),
but the major change in my style has been due to this inner
loop phenomenon. I now look with an extremely jaundiced eye
at every operation in a critical inner loop, seeking to
modify my program and data structure (as in the change from
Example 1 to Example 2) so that some of the operations can
be eliminated. The reasons for this approach are that: a)
it doesn't take long, since the inner loop is short; b) the
payoff is real; and c) I can then afford to be less
efficient in the other parts of my programs, which
therefore are more readable and more easily written and
debugged.
just wanted to let you know that I love your application!
I'll note that when I say it's not a big deal, I've been running iOS 8 on a 4S since it was released. With background app refresh disabled, it feels about like iOS 7.1.2 – periodic annoyance rather than frequent occurrence.
The middle paragraphs are just further proof that talking to a blowhard like Cory Doctorow is a complete waste of time. The "all photos are fake at some level" slippery slope argument is beyond tiresome. The fact that something like white balance introduces a small amount of post-processing into photographs does not mean that all levels of photo manipulation are somehow equal. That's nonsense on its face and should be called out as such. You need a trampoline and a net to make that kind of jump in logic.
> Pick what your team can be most productive with

Absolutely. If you already know one and like it, go forth and hack. If you're not sure, or don't like the one you have, there are tons of great options. Not just Flask/Django/Pyramid either. Tornado, Bottle, CherryPy, Falcon, and more all have dedicated users (some more than others).
On the plus side, I wonder if DoJ says, "Guys, we've only got 20 more requests until we bump into the next bracket -- is this one worth it?" That is, do they care what anyone thinks about how high or low the numbers are?
WW3 ISRAEL ATTACKED
Maybe this is a moral failing on my part, but I am still trying to figure out what was "wrong" about this. They found a bug. They exploited it. They asked other casinos to enable a function that allowed them to exploit it, but it was still a valid configuration for the game.

To me this sounds like IGT should have lost their shirts, but instead the NGC, local police and the IRS can recoup the loss from the individual and emerge unscathed?

I still cant see how this is wrong. But then again I think if you are good enough to count cards in blackjack you should be able to profit as well...
I used to `fix` that with the .js extension for firefox [0] and in my `$HOME/.js` folder I would drop a `newyorker.com.js` file :

$('div,a').css('position',
function (index, value) {
if (value == 'fixed')
return 'static'
}
)

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dotjs/
It's awfully expensive damage control, though.
"That's a good point, but taking advantage of a casino after a player asks the casino to help them cheat, and the casino obliges, is a much grayer area of morality than simply stealing stuff."

FWIW, the commenter wasn't referring to the morality of the practice. He mentioned what casinos would do, not whether it was right or wrong.
Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults
The Nevada gaming laws, as I understand it, allow for payout probabilities across a time threshold. E.g. Over a 24hr period this machine pays out 95 cents on the dollar. This gives the casino the ability to make a machine pay out $1.05 dollars to $1 early in the night, then change to worse odds as players become convinced its a hot machine.

So, one could argue the 'hack' was no different than this. The probability of paying out was set to 500 to 1 for 1 hand. This is legal for the casino to do, but you turn the tables and a guy goes to jail?

Regardless, this is just more evidence that the 'house always wins' (even when it looses).
We debated about this a lot. Jesse wrote to us via our Olark plugin, so there was a back-and-forth – he didn't just start swearing. He was one of our first customers, and having someone we didn't know love our product was awesome.

We liked how enthusiastic and genuine it sounded, and I've personally never liked when people type "f*cking" (we're all adults; that asterisk isn't tricking anyone.). But alas, we've removed it for now :)
I specifically address this pattern towards the end of my post (it's essentially the same pattern as Ruby's approach).
I know plenty of people in the developed world that drink bottled water. Its not that hard to taste the difference between 2 sources of water (filtered vs spring), and not everyone wants to drink fluoridated tap or rusty well water.
Even for building a mobile backend, having a framework can help. Tools like Cornice (Pyramid), Django REST framework, and Flask-REST can make building API's much easier.
It's really poor design. Widescreen displays are in the overwhelming majority at present, but few people prefer columns of text that fill the screen horizontally. Vertical screen real estate therefore commands a premium price. Users probably wouldn't mind a vertical bar off to the side nearly as much.
Prove 1+1=2
How in the world would remote wiping a lost card work? It only supports bluetooth from what I can find, so you'd have to be nearby?
I've never really understood why companies aren't able to disclose these numbers. It tells the public nothing about specific investigations.

To me - it seems like the government has chosen to draw the line in the sand so far beyond where it should be, to avoid having the actual debate over corporate disclosure of more-specific information.
I find I think on two levels in my startup: the big picture "billion dollar" vision that I sell to VCs and others looking 10 years out, and the "where we are now" shorter term product vision that I discuss with my team. I try to use the "solving a simple problem" portion to validate that the big picture problem does exist and is valuable, and that my company has the capability to solve it.

In the end its all about creating value for other people, and then convincing them to pay you a part of that value for your product or services. So problem solving is what pays the bills. But big vision is what gets people excited.
Product description describes remotely wiping from your mobile phone ...

How do they propose doing that ?
I'd argue for implementation (but not vendor) lock-in. While web components are making the idea of an Angular directive more portable, it's going to be hard to take the same templates and have the embedded directives (e.g. ng-repeat) honored and working elsewhere without any changes.
> If the current standard of care is a drug and you test against it, aren't you showing it's more effective?

The main issue is that a drug can be more effective than an older drug but still be less effective than taking no drug at all.

But given all the problems, both theoretical and practical, with current drug trials, there is pretty much no guarantee of anything. Just because something makes sense on paper doesn't mean that it's actually true. There are a number of books about the issues with drug trials... Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, Overdosed America, etc. All of these books cover largely different issues, so imho it's worth reading them all.
Audio Archaeology: The Voyager Golden Record
> and that it was more readable (which is so clearly wrong I have no words).

I never claimed that. In fact I didn't address readability at all. So I have no words for your "no words" relating to a claim that literally didn't appear at all.

> The range is worse (lol wraparound if you're using a 32-bit int), there isn't explicit support for fractional seconds, doesn't map onto UTC cleanly, doesn't handle leap seconds, and so on.

Fortunately we're already well on our way into a 64 bit world, and aside from legacy systems it won't be a problem by 2038. According to the Steam hardware survey [0] over 80% of Windows machines, 100% of OS X machines, and 90% of Linux machines are already running a 64 bit OS.

Leap seconds can be handled during the cultural conversion.

> It's only "easier" if you don't actually care about a human-readable timestamp that is robust and if you desire to do date parsing yourself instead of using any of the well-established libraries out there. Ugh.

I don't care about human readable timestamps for an API used in automation. More robust is subjective, particularly as parsing it is more technically complex (particularly as most of the parsers support several different but similar DateTime formats).

Most well-established libraries support UNIX time natively or use it internally.

[0]http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
You remind me of the space pirate Pugg, as encountered in the sixth sally of Trurl and Klapaucius as described in The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem.

That is to say, however much you pre-sort your data, there will still be a virtual infinity of them still left, all abiding your pre-set conditions, but all still uninteresting.
This article says many things that need to be said, but I take issue with this:

> No sane person can argue that we want to bifurcate a programming language into distinct base-level and type-level fragments.

Well, I must be insane then. I much prefer writing type expressions in a language free from, say, mutation and iteration.

Restricting languages aids not only computers which analyze programs, but also humans which create programs. It's much easier to remember, say, "I'm not allowed to mutate anything, there's no syntax for it", than, "I can use mutation, but if I use it in such-and-such a way, then compiler won't be able to statically determine the type, unless I have version 4.2.3 or later".
Rich brought this up in his Strange Loop talk [1]. All the attempts he had seen either disallowed perfectly valid uses or allowed invalid ones. I believe to really guarantee early termination and a few other tricky invariants of reducers you would need a linear type system. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substructural_type_system#Linea...
Clojure and the UFC: Part 1
Just push?

With the intelligence community hacking into Senators' computers to defend themselves from investigation, even admitting it, at will, with no reprimand? And have it barely scrape the news?

Is it that easy? Can we just repeal bills like the Patriot Act? Look at how easy it was for Australia to invent a media blitz of fear to pass legislation allowing surveillance that has no counter terrorism purpose.
If I understand correctly, companies cannot say "we have received X (let's say 9) requests".

So, is it possible for them to say "We have NOT received 8 or 10 requests"? This clearly doesn't say how many they have received but gives a clue that they might have received 9.

Please ignore me if this is silly.
I'm guessing it pairs with your phone, and automatically wipes once it disconnects (maybe after some timeout).
That's exactly what I came here to say - if this can do chip and PIN, then can't we assume chip and PIN is broken? Cloning a mag stripe is trivial, cloning chip and PIN should be as close to impossible as is feasible.
I can't help to think this and Coin are each a solution in search of a problem. Do you know many people that use more than 3 cards regularly? If the norm was to have so many cards they barely fit in your wallet this would be perfect.
Nature – The easiest way to analyze your data
That only works if the lifetime of a resource is a lexical region, right?
More video tutorials for One Month students
How does Chip and Pin work? Do they cut your existing card's out? I very much doubt they can clone the Chip..
It's not a slight advantage if you've ever had to parse through logfiles by hand or debug APIs with curl--it's a great deal more than that.

Why not, let's have some more examples:

In PHP (with a bug, because PHP is stupid and doesn't handle decimal fractions):

$dateTime = DateTime::createFromFormat( DateTime::ISO8601, '2009-04-16T12:07:23Z');

In C#:

DateTime time = DateTime.Parse("2010-08-20T15:00:00Z", null, DateTimeStyles.RoundtripKind);

In Python (stupid that it isn't in the standard library, see https://wiki.python.org/moin/WorkingWithTime):

import dateutil.parser
dateutil.parser.parse('2008-08-09T18:39:22Z')

In Perl:
my $dt = DateTime::Format::ISO8601->parse_datetime( "2008-08-09T18:39:22Z" );

~

Interchange formats, say JSON blobs over a wire, should very clearly express what's in them, perhaps by using a very well-known standard which is human-readable, whenever possible. The fact that some languages haven't yet realized that this is an important-enough feature to put in their standard libraries compared with whatever esoteric academic shit they think is necessary (C++1x, for example!) is not the format's problem.

Hint: if you're consuming a web API, you are probably using one of the languages I gave examples for, or a very close relative. Just because your Haskell-on-M68k package doesn't know how to 8601 doesn't mean that using a nondescript number is a good idea.

Why, in the year of our Lord 2014, is this even a fucking question?

EDIT:

I'm sorry to be so mean in my language about this, but I've had to fight a lot of raging stupid with regards to storing timestamp data. I do not wish to see anyone else suffer unduly.
Old versions of Winamp were pretty great.

Also I remember being pretty blown away when Delphi came out.
Readability?

https://www.readability.com/
Will Apple reject your app if it's not unique?
I hope not - what if that one man gets hit by a bus?

I always assumed HN was more of an operations challenge rather then a purely algorithmic one. Lotsa traffic I assume. Not sure about the scope of user/comment moderation around here but something tells me their item ranking system just might be that good.