skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in the UK. When I get an appointment at my doctor's surgery, I see a doctor, not a nurse. (Unless it's for something that's done by nurses because their skills are more relevant than a doctor's, such as ear syringing.)

I've only once been to the doctor and gone away thinking I'd been deprived of treatment or tests that I needed; on that occasion, there didn't turn out to be anything wrong with me, so I'm not going to complain too loudly.

If your doctor is prescribing antibiotics for a cold or the flu, then s/he is incompetent and you should not be using this behaviour as evidence that your system is better than ours. Antibiotics do nothing for viral diseases like colds and flu.

(Note: for some of my life I have had private medical insurance paid for by my employer. I believe I have made use of it twice. The first time, there turned out to be nothing wrong with me. The second time, I think I did benefit from the private treatment, but I'd actually probably have been best off if I had been seen by a nurse first rather than my doctor.)
I feel dirty bribing users as it is, but if it makes the clock tick, then so be it.
the 77.4 percent of Burlington Northern Santa Fe it did not already own for $34 billion in cash and stock, in the largest deal in Berkshire history.

But wait, they also assumed 10 billion in debt. So they just "spent" 34 billion buying sock + 10 billion debts to get the company.

PS: I don't know when BH got their initial stake, but they could have paid something like (34 / .774) = ~43.9 billion to get the company. Assuming the company was profitable and paying down the debt you can somewhat ignore it.
If you think of it in terms of 'getting content' you're doomed. At Yahoo they were always yammering about 'user-generated content' like it was 'free stuff we can slap ads on'. Maybe you don't mean anything by the term, but I think such terms do have the power to shape our thinking.

People participate on sites that think of them as members, or valued contributors. Figure out how you and they have a shared agenda.

Some concrete ideas:

1) seed with content -- call all your friends

2) bribery -- tickets, coupons : poor quality content is likely though

3) make the demand visible. Add a feature allowing people to request ratings of certain courses. The person who answers the need then feels more heroic and you can even reward with karma points

4) callbacks -- allow people to enter email addresses to be notified when certain courses are rated. Bonus! These people will be worth asking for ratings in a few months.

5) leaderboards, achievements for being helpful, funny, etc.

6) PR: get articles written about you in the student press. Quality control is pretty lax in most cases. Your issue is the price of textbooks and their ultimate value, which is genuinely controversial. Or, ask your valued members to write letters to the editor on the topic.
Codifying best practices into a language core is worth doing and should not be dismissed just because nothing new or groundbreaking was invented.

A similar statement could be made about Ruby on Rails. Nothing groundbreakingly new but many useful conventions tied together by rule created a new, more powerful experience.
Tilera Taunts Intel With a 100-Core Chip
Screen doesn't do vertical splits. That's a dealbreaker for me. Tmux does.

But tmux has another problem: very rapid scrolling in one window will make the program completely unresponsive. In the same situation, screen doesn't have this problem. I posted to the user list and the developer very quickly sent me a patch, but it didn't fix the problem for me, although it worked for the developer. Still working with the developer on this.
No, you can buy B shares at 30-1 value of A shares for about $3000.
I am yet to find any use for the Real Time Web in whatever (twitter,email,facebook,rss feeds) format. As a consumer none of these actually enhance either my productivity or knowledge in anyway, they are merely there for entertainment.

Surprisingly, the only exception to that is probably FreeNode IRC , certain channels at least.

Yes, there are certain bloggers i want to read, certain discussions on HN that i want to participate in but it takes time for me to assimilate and understand what is going on, the RTW doesn't help me there.
Plus $10B in debt.
I think we actually completely agree. I agree with all your further believes too.
The only thing that worries me about this is users entering false reviews just to get points.

This is what we call a "high class problem". (Since HN has an international audience I'll explain that one: it means a problem where the fact of having the problem demonstrates that you're already in a status which arouses envy. For example, "Finding parking for my gigantic luxury sedan was difficult but I finally found one." probably makes sense to the guy who said it it but will not be looked upon favorably by the cashier he said it to.)

You currently have a website with no content, no users, no community, and no income. If you're ever finding yourself worrying about folks gaming your karma system, its because you have a website with awesome content, lots of users, a community people want to be a part of, and probably still no income.

(Sorry, I'm letting my "charge money for it" bias slip through. OK, delete that that one, the point still holds.)
Calling them an idiot isn't going to make them curious about conceptual blind spots they may have inherited from their primary language, just encourage them to ignore you.
I like 3 & 5. Leaderboards for which college has the most reviews, which user has the most reviews, etc. Reminds me of how NikePlus has little competitions for runners. "Be the first group to make 10000 miles". Perhaps this could be a way to inspire people to add reviews.
Correct handling of dates and times in the general case (i.e, arbitrary time zones and arbitrary dates in the past, including calendar and time zone changes) is one of those things that I have tentatively filed under "too complicated for me to hope to get right", along with "correct handling of Unicode"[0] and "concurrency with fully shared mutable state"[1].

In practice, my rule is that if you can avoid dealing with the full complexity of date/time, such as by working in absolute time as much as possible and explicitly restricting the allowed date range, then do so; anywhere you have to work with dates/times as non-opaque values, always prefer library functions that explicitly say they conceptually do what you want, not ones that provide low level operations that let you do what you want, probably, at least in your own locale, for now. If your platform provides only a broken date/time implementation, use a third-party library.

Fun anecdote time! When an international group pushed for a standardized, absolute time, the English and French both wanted it to be named in their own language, "coordinated universal time" vs. "temps universel coordonné". The compromise of UTC provided an "acronym" that, by design, didn't make sense to anyone, which I think is somewhat telling about the whole issue. The blog post here gives a good overview of fundamental difficulties, though doesn't really convey the true horror of the subject; I often suspect that a full and complete description of the proper handling for date/times can be found only in an appendix of the Necronomicon, serving as a final deathblow to any last scraps of the reader's sanity.

[0] cf. Michael Kaplan's MSDN blog for a glimpse at all the ways Unicode can go wrong. See how many entries you can read successively until starting to doubt whether written communication was ever actually a good idea! I think my personal record is 14 or so.

[1] cf. anyone who's ever tried. I don't think I need to justify this one.
I suppose it is a matter of perspective, but many people choose to be entrepreneurs because they don't want to work for people with more capital than them, hence the term "capitalist masters."
When you're writing documentation or designing UIs, please remember that the right and left references for the mouse buttons are entirely ambiguous.

Most mice have been configurably-ambidextrous for a decade or more, after all.

The X Windows folks got this one right very early on with their configurability and their use of MB1, MB2, MB3 notation for the mouse buttons.
Same here , when i discovered it i couldn't understand how i had been working without it for so long , suddenly i had 1 large terminal rather than "n" different terminals.

The only thing i miss now is vertical splits , i think tmux solves that problem as well.
Coconuts to help cool thermonuclear (fusion) reactors
Thank you. For a second, I was afraid the post didn't communicate what I intended.

Do you have any suggestions as to how I could have communicated this better?
Nice that you assume I don't know what kind of panels Dell uses (currently e-IPS and S-PVA, 8 bit) while Apple hitherto was, to put it politely, not known for using quality panels in their offering (TN <cough> 6 bit <coughcough>). I'm glad to Cupertino is at least up to snuff when it comes to Dell. Took sure their sweet time doing that.

The only kind of displays suitable for professional work are the expensive kind that comes with an external calibrator. Neither Dell nor Apple sells these.

Next time, please don't assume people are ignorant.
I'm building mail server
You're absolutely right. Worrying about those kind of details is along the lines of "counting your chickens before they hatch".
Poll: How do you read HN?
After some discussion over the past week regarding comments, it occurs to me that there are vastly different ways of reading HackerNews.

Some people, like myself most of the time, check out the newcomments page to see what's hot and then read the article and join in to things that seem stimulating.

Other people (like myself other times) come in to the main page and read all the stories that have high scores and might seem interesting, then come back to the comments.

Still others read each story individually, decide whether to vote, and then read the comments as a huge hierarchical tree. Then they come back to that article on HN and check out the comment tree from time to time to see how it's changed.

Finally some folks are our "diggers" -- checking out the new page first and ranking those articles for others to consume.

It occurs to me that different ways of reading HN create different standards for what "fits" as a good comment or not. If you read HN for discussion primarily, checking the newcomments as a gateway into dialogue, you think of HN more as a slow version of IRC. Comments that veer to a small degree off-topic are okay as long as they continue dialog.

If, on the other hand, you view HN as creating a comment tree ranked by "goodness", then comments must both fit neatly into the main topic at all times and also make sense when compared to geat-great and great-great-great grandparent comments.

So what is it? How do you read HN?
I focus on conversation first, checking out the newcomments page as an indicator of what I might want to read
I focus on articles first, clicking and reading the links that are good before coming back to HN and voting/participating
I focus on the content/structure of HN first, reading each article sequentially and then commenting at the appropriate point in the comment tree. I judge comments by how well they fit into the "structure" of the ongoing conversation
Xensource open sources Xen Cloud Platform
Most touchscreen phone users wouldn't buy again, survey claims
I'm a digger, finding, commenting, upvoting, and ranking new articles first.
Another option for recurring/subscription billing - Aria Systems http://www.AriaSystems.com. Aria has been in this space since 2003 and the platform is very powerful and very customizable. Also, Aria works with customers of all sizes - including startups.
Help HN: Need Windows Hosting with a Scalable MSSQL Database.... Help..
Hey all,

Ive been searching my ASS off for a VPS hosting provider for Windows Hosting. I can't seem to nail one down that fits my requirements exactly...

My requirements:

Less $45.00 a month before the Database.

(Most Important) MSSQL Database that can Scale. I take about 1GB worth of data every 6 months. So I need to be able to scale that database like crazy in a couple of months. I don't want a limit on this either. I want to be able to buy more space etc..

So can anyone out there help me? Im in real need and any help would be awesome!!!
The passphrase is the weak point in PGP. I suppose some people treat it like a password, which is the wrong approach. It should be much longer and harder than a normal password.

Their analysis does demonstrate how cost-effective it has become to crack low-complexity passwords.
According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788707.aspx VB 6 was end of lifed in March of 2008. You can no longer buy support or licenses for VB 6. Microsoft is trying not to break running applications in Windows 7, but has officially said that this will be the last version of the OS with support.

On the Linux example, didn't I just say that attention to backwards compatibility is orthogonal to the source being open? I didn't use Linux as my poster child for good reason! And even within Linux, you'll find wide variation between distributions. (Debian being an example that is pretty good, Red Hat being mediocre at best, and Gentoo being infamous for regularly breaking things.)
Buffett's bet is not on management, its on the dollar losing value b/c its being printed like mad to meet gov't obligations and it losing its place as the reserve currency.

Railroads can haul a ton of goods about 400 miles with one gallon of diesel. When the dollar devalues and gas goes to $5-$10+ per gallon, we will be reminded once again why he is the Oracle of Omaha.

Buffett has talked about coming inflation in his last two or three annual letters to shareholders. When we start having 10% annual inflation, the p/e on this deal will get better and better.

"The Green Back Effect" by Warren Buffett, NYT, 8/18/09 - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS346US.... (sorry for the indirect Google link, NYT redirects direct links to a tease subscriber only page)
Buffett already owned a sizeable chunk of BNI, he was just finishing the deal, apparently.
DB Charmer – ActiveRecord Connection Magic Plugin
KDE 4.3.3 has been released - Linux Critic
I have to disagree, Buffett doesn't trade macro--he trades value. The (alleged) dollar devaluation may have been included in his analysis, but that's not the underlying rationale behind the trade.
Except after reading the article, a more apt title might be 'How to Prevent Women From Destroying the Planet'
Can you recommend any good reads on how web site design can influence interaction with your web site (if such a thing exists)? Or any good reads on web design in general. I already know the technical points (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc), but I'm looking for more information on design best practices.
This Is It - Michael Jackson
Black and Decker got bought out today too. Those are huge deals.
That was a good writeup. I use screen so often, that I don't think much about it, so this article was a good refresher.

A little off topic, but: I should spend about 5% of the time I devote to exploring new programming languages to revisiting command shortcuts, etc. for tools like Emacs, Idea, Rubymine, Eclipse, etc. A few days ago, I set up Emacs for Rails development (involved learning a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts) - now depending on what aspects of a project I am working on, I use either Rubymine or Emacs (or TextMate if I have my MacBook booted to OS X)
Not so fast. She was quoting Lancet. Moreover, she's not the only source.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15213#fromrss
Personally, I think the LLVM addition is quite exciting. I think there is some good performance potential there, and I think you get as a side effedt nice portability.
> >One is that a lot of healthcare and education in the US is tax-supported.

> It may very well be but less of it is compared to Scandinavia so the point is the same.

Not so fast. You wrote "It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective." You otherwise assumed that health care is largely private in the US. It's not - it's about half public. Moreover, the public spending is concentrated on the poor. So, they're getting govt healthcare and buying big screen TVs.

> I could only find cancer deaths not survival rates once you do have cancer. In a lot of ways that is what matters and can mean better preventive care. On the other hand it adds a bunch of environmental factors.

As someone else has posted, the "not get cancer" stuff, which isn't due to health care, overmatches what happens when you get cancer, which is when health care matters.
Peter Schiff always talks about this. He doesn't really focus on the bonds going bankrupt, he predicts that foreign countries will stop loaning our government money (at its various levels) , and therefore the government will resort to printing money and the rate inflation will exceed the rate of return on a bond.
They would also need a way to validate the data unless the encryption was symmetric, I don't think they have tested this out on data they didn't already have.
Propaganda certainly wasn't my goal; I'm sorry the post came across that way. It's a fact that open source consistently produces incredible software; I'm trying to feel my way towards some reasons why that might be. Thinking out loud is tough work; hope you'll cut me some slack.
Particularly makes sense given Buffett's own public worries about a poisoned dollar.
> When storing localtime+timezone, do as the article recommends. Store the timezone, not the offset from UTC. Store "New York time" not EST or EDT.

The problem is that that isn't well defined, as I point out here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919407

There are two UTC times corresponding to each moment from 00:00->01:00 25th Oct 2009 "London Time". There are no UTC times corresponding to 01:00->02:00 29th March 2009 "London Time".

> Also there is the possibility that you actually want to store the timezone information at write-time, rather than assuming a timezone at read-time.

Whether a given time should be displayed in the viewer's localtime or another time is a display issue (I may want to switch between seeing my plane arrival time in localtime of the destination and localtime of my body clock). I don't think it should affect the internal storage format as without help from a strong type system (or some strong coding conventions) coders will intermingle the two types and miss errors in testing either due to geographical proximity or lack of testing over daylight savings boundaries.

[All the above saud, the problem of changing DST parameters and future event times is problematic. I think it depends on what you want to be doing with such a time. Note that you'd have the opposite bug if you were storing pre-calculated sunrise time in various locales, so it's an issue of the semantic meaning of the timestamp.]
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917428
http://www.google.com/search?q=droid

"Droid". First match. Has summary.

SEO is snake oil.
Common Django Patterns applied to Search (Haystack)
Also, I hate it when people don't use their turn signals.
Huh? Freight rail and passenger rail are basically at odds with one another.

For efficient transportation, we want freight rail.
completely subjective to personal tastes & choice. You can be a startup out of shimla ( Ankit from instablog.com) or Kanpur (Abdul Qabiz's) or the southern most tip of south mumbai ( Sahil from Deskaway)

i've worked at a startup in bangalore , co-founded one in chennai and moved to pune because apart from loving to travel & pune's proximity to Mumbai for certain biz needs. But I'm fortunate to attend more events out of pune, so the hub is essentally how ever far u can extend it! barcamps used to depict the ecosystem, but now OCC's do a better job of it.

here are some nice reads:
http://punetech.com , http://punestartups.ning.com
http://www.abdulqabiz.com/blog/archives/2009/03/25/what-i-am...
http://trak.in/tags/business/2009/09/23/india-silicon-valley...

Pune though I have to admit has the most receptive & fairly mature startup ecosystem in the country today, in my arguably biased view.

~B
And don't forget the Zune time bug which caused a bit of embarrassment for Microsoft last year/beginning of this year. It's hard to test every boundary and edge condition, especially if you are relying on black box testing to catch bugs.
Announcing Duck It, a new way to search
Well, you can express it any way you like. Math is flexible that way!

Note that from 4.8% to 5.3% is actually an increase by 10%, namely: 0.048 * 1.1 = 0.053, or 4.8% * 110% = 5.3%.

I imagine you're looking at it and seeing the difference between percentages (0.5%), not the ratio between them (1.1), a distinction that trips people up not infrequently.
The point I made regarding uniform students was to emphasize that admissions committees admit students based on the profile they want the class to look like and not just on the individual merits of the student themselves. I think this is an important point that often gets overlooked by applicants.

Good points about the demographic trends. I'm still not very convinced. The points you raised are just as speculative as mine. True a higher % of hs students may be going to college, but is that rate of increase faster than the rate of decline in the total number of applicants? In a few years the bottom will fall out, can the % of hs students attending college rise to meet that gap?

I see your point about the trend in international students. Though I find it doubtful that any elite US school will ever have more than 10-20% of their class be composed of non-US students.
If their inclination is to ignore people who know more than they do about a topic, then they are more or less hopeless. I don't think that people should be shy about discussing what is actually the case with languages, just because some people won't react in a reasonable way to the suggestion that some languages are more advanced than others.
Guy seems to know a lot about analytics, CTR, and such for someone who only works 1 hour a week. Just writing that blog post surely took up at least 1/3 of his total work allotment for this week.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
There is a port of screen that includes vertical splits. Its nifty, but requires the source to be patched:

http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/
Clickable link: http://www.billonsite.com/
Shoot - shoulda done that myself.
What are the chances that someone viewing a decade-old article will just happen to be viewing it at the exact same time as someone else is viewing it AND at the exact same time that this other person is submitting a comment on it?
Jerry Seinfeld Dumps Microsoft, Goes Back To Mac
We'll know when we get there?
MongoDB Developer 10gen Raises $3.4 Million
Describing relationships: Django's many-to-many through
How to implement many-to-many relationships with extra fields, or, Many-to-Many Through. Covers django models and admin.
The split won't actually raise capital for the deal, but will help to payoff shareholders of the railroad. According to http://www.marketwatch.com/story/berkshire-approves-50-for-1... the split is to "accommodate holders of smaller amounts of BNSF shares who opt for a share exchange rather than a cash payment."

So, some shareholders of Burlington will opt for shares instead of cash, and since you can’t own a fraction of a share, they have to split the stock to accommodate them.
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