skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're missing my point: it doesn't matter whether you have one pool or many-- pooling people together is what shares the risk, and in order to do that, you need a large number of people. That's a service that health insurers provide.

The fact that health insurance in the US is tied to place of employment is a weird historical artifact, but the value the insurers provide woudl be the same if it were not the case. You may not pool your car insurance with your co-workers, but you are pooling it with somebody-- in this case, the other people who purchase insurance from the same auto insurance company as you.
This would be even better if it could break down javascript execution time on a line by line basis. I was able to spot an inefficient javascript file, but only found the culprit by commenting and uncommenting lines (inefficient jquery selector).

Way cool though.
There is a big difference between humans iterating to improve technology and machines iterating to improve technology that improves the machines. The latter is a stronger feedback loop.

But generally, I agree. We're biased to under-appreciate the impacts of past changes.
http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=ujjwalg

(only you can see your own)
Agreed. (Though I still have my terminal set to green-on-black.)
He will no doubt be proven right on some things and wrong on others.

In general though, if I had a big pot of money and had to decide on where to invest it, my decisions would likely fall along the same lines. Key here, as another commenter said, is not that success would be "impossible" but rather "improbable".
> Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.

This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.
Ron : Humane text format and toolchain for creating UNIX man pages
Cassandra users survey
You forgot the third choice: using pen and paper. I'll take the pen+paper and the occassional green-screen.
The last doubling was really significant. You know, instant free communication to humans anywhere on the world as well as instant access to the sum total of human knowledge.
No. Everyone managed to not imbibe two days prior to the official testing. We all had advance notice.
Can I get a green-screen terminal hooked up to the Internet?
In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation
I certinaly don't.

Is this intended as a HN make-work program? :)
Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities.

Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.
PHP: Past, Present and Future
I know, but I cannot make them public or categorize them. And it will take me a while to come to articles which I upvoted 6 months back.
IPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Disregard Of Context
I just started reading the series myself a few weeks ago, and I'm completely addicted now.

I like the idea of a really long series, because too often I get sucked into the world of a story, and I'm disappointed when the story ends.
This is really wonderful! The games play quickly on Chrome, how well do they preform on IE?

The Mario demo was great, and the Platformer demo really expanded on that to show it supports modern techniques.

Just FYI, in Chrome, http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/ shows alert boxes complainigna bout unloaded resources.

I didn't see it mentioned on the site, but what is your revenue model for this? Advertisements? Charge for the devtools?

Do you deal with multiplayer at all yet?

Best of luck with this project!
Science is dead
Many people have worked off far larger debts on far smaller salaries, many of them working far more difficult jobs than being a college professor. Not to mention those to whom these kinds of educational opportunities were never even a possibility. A little perspective is in order.
It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people.

A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.

These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.

Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.
Ruby Block Styling (Homoiconic/Reg Braithewaite)
Although it is sometimes hard to make work in all cases, I've recently moved a big project from MySQL to a Amazon's SimpleDB and S3 and it has turned out awesome. You have to design the system from the ground up to deal with the 'eventual consistency' problem, but that problem is fairly tractable and easy to wrap your head around. And the reward is 'infinite' scalability and no single points of failure. Good stuff. SQL is still great for the simple projects where you don't need to worry about uptime or scalability, but for everything else I'm sold on AWS (or BigTable)
I would assume that adding a layer of abstraction would be slower than native calls, regardless of the language.
It's my opinion that this dilbert is fairly relevant to HN. A lot of pg's early articles were addressing this feature-matching sentiment and how they approached it at viaweb.
I got your point, your not getting mine. My point was that I, if I am self employed, get the same rates and benefits on my car ins. as someone that works at IBM. Health ins should be the same way. One pool per insurer.

That said, it is not going down that way and that is not even being discussed. Dem leaders wussed out, any PO is a start though
But people don't want to watch that. The barrier to entry for creating and distributing porn is so low these days that it's almost guaranteed to just push more of the industry into the "amateur" realm.
This is a cool tool, but I suspect its major use-case will be premature optimization.
Looks like a great start, Michael!
This reminds me of the book More Sex is Safer Sex by Steven Landsburg.
First off, thanks for the kind words! You shouldn't be seeing a significant difference in performance on IE (6-8). We'll look into the alert boxes, are you in Chrome on Windows? We currently don't charge for use of the services. And, absolutely looking at dealing with multiplayer in the future.
The goal is just to design the right game, then hopefully the right behavior will just sort of plop out of it.

Google has a similar problem regarding SEO. Their search engine is a game for SEOs to play. If they can set up the game well enough (ie if the referee can detect relevant content with high accuracy), then the "ordinary" providers of content and the SEO folks will merge. Then you don't care if somebody says they've used SEO to get on top of the search rankings, because they legitimately belong there.

Until they really have a bulletproof relevance algorithm (which is an AI complete problem, I suppose), they have to keep a lot of the rules, the proxies for relevance, hidden.

Of course, when you win the Google game, you get cold hard cash. So there is a legion of obsessive players trading tips and trying to figure out the game. I wonder if you could make a fun game for a site with hidden mechanics and unpredictable rewards, without that pot of gold at the end, that could still draw customers...
I have a graduate degree in robotics, and I think that robots will be as capable as humans within a few decades. I also think it is likely we can engineer a solution to aging, but I'm not as familiar with the tech there.
Ask HN/PG: Information on the algorithm behind story/comment ordering on HN?
I'm currently creating several community oriented websites and it's become obvious to me that one of the biggest challenges is making sure that new content gets noticed while reinforcing the importance of good content by rewarding good comments/stories with better placement.

To this end I am currently using a sort order based on an interpolation of rating and age. However, there is clearly a lot of room for improvement in my algorithm.

Before working to come up with something better from scratch I thought I would try to get some more info on the best algorithm I know of, the one used by Hacker News!

My current algorithm (in SQL) is fairly crude but seems to be working to an extent:

( rating - ((UNIX_TIMESTAMP(UTC_TIMESTAMP()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(created_at)) / 43200 ) ) DESC

Suggestions for improvement welcomed...
And yet persistent threads in entrepreneurial discussions on HN is 'find your passion, the follow it' and 'make something great, if you build it they will come'. I agree with these ideas, the whole point of a large open economy (and one that is compounded by the internet) is that there's a market for everything and if you're really good at what you do then you'll get by. The point of meritocracy is to reward excellence.

And, you know, this lady excels in the field of native american studies. That might seem frivolous and useless to other people, but suppose we pursue your thought to its logical conclusion and let that field die off because the economic benefits are not clearly quantifiable. Who will teach it if anyone wants to study it in the future? It's not like we can import people from Asian or Europe, is it? They don't mint scholars of our indigenous culture. I'm disturbed by your suggestion that the history and anthropology of a country's indigenous culture (even one that has been displaced) lacks any economic utility.
Apple introduces iPhone developer RSS feed, takes time off from iTunes Connect
Her field of study is an unwise economic choice. That part of the comment you're replying to isn't an opinion.
not to mention resource/energy limitations
From its man page:

"
BUGS

Ron is written in Ruby and depends on nokogiri and rdiscount, native extension libraries that are non-trivial to install on some systems. A more portable version of this program would be welcome.
"
How is my above comment defending it? :/ I actually extremely rarely use any js libs. I'd rather just do it myself. And no I'm nothing to do with the project.
From a Web Designer’s Point of View: Is the client leaving clients on the table?
Use the google one instead... 8.8.8.8

or the other ones from layer 3(I think it's layer 3):
4.2.2.(1-4)
I have a question regarding this actually. I can see NoSQL style data stores being really well suited to things like sets of permissions or user profiles (where there are a lot of fields that may or may not be blank and/or arbitrary). However, how do you model the eventual relationships that are necessary?

All of the articles that come up seem to deal with _what_ a NoSQL data store might be, rather than how to build an application with one. Perhaps I'm missing something really obvious (which is often the case) but I'd love to hear more about how you modeled your data.
Right, and the next doubling will be even better (twice as good!). But the sense that we're right on the threshold of the infinite future has probably been around at least since industrialization.

For example, that bit about instant access to people and knowledge was probably said about the telegraph too.
Looks great! absOrb is the only demo that doesn't load for me, os x / safari webkit nightly. Here's the console error:

TypeError: Result of expression 'this.yH.gk' [null] is not an object.
engine-0.12b.js:52
Men compete for women (that is one reason their economy is booming).

> How much money is enough to pay a hundred million men that there simply aren't women for?

There are millions of Chinese living overseas (esp. in Africa). They will change local demographics.
Some time back PG posted the exact algorithm used. If you search through his history you'll be able to find it. Use searchyc.com to do it.
Looks awesome!

Without necessarily being negative about Flash-based games, I think your homepage should clearly mention that users only need Javascript enabled. Seems like a very strong selling/marketing point for developers.
I bet that whole light coming from little threads in your walls that kill you if you touch them was quite a doozy too. Commercial airflight. Fertilizer. The idea of foreign pathogens causing diseases.

Which is not to say that internet technology isn't widely more crazy than all of those previous or that there won't continue to be wider and crazier things to come. It is to say that we're not escaping exponential growth and there still isn't anything like a spike in that sort of curve.

The singularity theory proposes an increase from exponential: some technology that speeds new technology's ability to speed new technology. Without the feedback --- without the efficient feedback --- everything "stays exponential". Which is only really depressing if you're looking for hypersmart AI and endless free human life in the next 20 orso.
At one point I was attempting to build something similar to this. I eventually decided that it was a bad idea and wouldn't work.

(I still have my domain though :))
Top innovative technology achievements of 2009
> you can taste and smell if something went bad

If something smells and tastes bad, it probably contains enough bacteria to hurt you. The inverse isn't always true.
as am i -- sam :)
Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities.

You know nothing about poverty.

Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.

Almost no one expects or even wants "equality of outcome", but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs. You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.
Sometimes, do you ever feel like people just think too much?
You can follow the TechCrunch Euro Startup Events group at Upcoming or via RSS. I think they cover all the major events in Europe. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/2358/
Discount rates won’t help here because no matter how sharply you discount infinite bliss, it’s still infinite. But if I truly believe the hype about my celestial reward, or my infernal punishment, how can I fail so utterly to align my actions with my incentives.

This is, I think, the only actual point this blog post has to make. If you're interested in the debate between theism and atheism, you could do worse than reading Ross Douthat (a reasonable conservative Catholic) and Christopher Hitchens. But then, if you're interested in this debate, you already have.

So then, all this post is is bait. "But, heaven is infinite! Infinity minus anything is still infinity! If it was real, you shouldn't be able to question it!". This is about as perceptive as the rock God has to be able to make that he can't move.

Flagged.
It worked very well for me in Chrome v 3.0.195.25. Impressed! Just a short observation, down the line you may wish that your pages are indexed by the search engines, by generating in js they will not.
The Phrase That’s Screwing Up the Afghan Air War
"only one outbreak in that community, which is far better than your average college campus"

So the average college campus has much more than one outbreak of HIV? Somehow I doubt that...
Thanks so much for the great feedback! Keep it coming (any and all honest feedback is welcomed).

Pete Borowsky
Founder/CEO, Zatista
You could make the same arguments in every industry that exists, somehow software is the only one that gets away with it. Even our counterparts in hardware are held to a higher standard.

Djikstra and Hoare are the only ones who tried to advance a higher standard and yet beyond naming an award for one and singing praises of the other, the field has continued to accept lesser standards.
seems like something scheduling software could solve pretty easily
I agree with you that that is what China's leadership wants.

But it's almost impossible to estimate the kind of pressure that will be put on those leaders, when these 30million+ poor males start realizing they are not going to reproduce.

On top of not having the ability to reproduce, these 30million+ poor males are going to be shouldered with the responsibility of spending their money to support their parents.

It's a psychological crunch if there ever was one. A psychological crunch of epic proportions.

I predict the Chinese authorities already have pacification plans in place. Probably a combination of wide-scale drugging and relentless propaganda emphasizing pacifism, loyalty, and duty to the state. The Chinese authorities will need to find a scapegoat that isn't themselves, and it will probably be some combination of every other country. :)

If the Chinese authorities point the aggression of these poor males in the direction of other countries, you have a recipe for war even if the war is just an Orwellian war-for-show.

I would recommend slavery as an option to relieve the pressure, but typically even slaves are allowed to have children and then the children are used as collateral to keep the men in line when they would otherwise revolt.

Beyond mass-scale drugging and propaganda of unimaginable magnitude I don't see how this can't end violently - whether the violence occurs within China or is exported to some dumping ground like Africa.
Founder / non-founder executive compensation data at private companies
Muttator nightlies run on 3.0, but I found them unusable.
Free classified ads in Uttaranchal, India  
Free classified ads search engine in Uttaranchal, India. A free, easy and fast way to find or to place ads in Uttaranchal.
Maybe he means the general glut of wholly worthless iPhone apps that merely translate some web app or some gimmick onto the device. As an iPhone developer, I agree that most of what is going on falls into the fad category. If that's what he is talking about, then he's right. Don't sink time into building such-and-such for the iPhone when you could be exploring any of the other worthwhile areas he outlines in the list.
You should remember that there is already a selection process going. Most women will refrain from marrying a violent person. The violent person will therefore be "unmarried" yet the high crime rate hasn't anything to do with marraige.
Awesome, I was thinking of doing a custom engine, since JS performance is reaching the point where it can compete with flash, and I have no desire to learn ActionScript. Big kudos for doing this and sharing it with everyone.

Crystal Galaxy performs very well on Mac Chrome, and feels more responsive than any flash game I've encountered (though it sometimes stutters a bit on some of the explosions).
I'd have to see the college accounts before I'd concede that. If it is so lacking in value, I wonder how come it was so expensive for her to obtain her PhD?
Her work does not benefit others very much as demonstrated by their revealed preferences: no one is willing to pay her much for her teaching.

I'm saying that we'd be better off as a society if most people who want to become scholars in Native American Studies don't do it, and become nurses instead. Less fun for them, but great for those of us who want the services of a nurse more than the services of a professor. We compensate them for the lack of fun with money.
I smoke ganj every evening, been doing so for probably 10 years + now. I'm nowhere near the amount heavy tokers smoke, (somehow i'm still a lightweight) but as long as I only smoke in the evening it has no bearing on my productivity or ability.
It isn't addictive. If I have none, I just go without, it's annoying (as I like to smoke in the evenings) but its not a problem.

I work as a contractor, developer and software architect. At the moment i'm working on a rather large system in a senior role. I also do little bits of work in my own time for other businesses I have relationships with.
You do know Moore's law, don't you?

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

Aside from that, the difference between one human and all of us is only 2^32 - so if you can place the intelligence of one human on a chip, you'll be able to do the same thing with all of humanity 64 years later. And that's ignoring things like reduced costs per chip / using multiple chips for the same price.
Perl's Pod (Plain Old Documentation) is actually a pretty humane format that exports to manpage, HTML, text, etc:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

We did all of our command line tool man pages in it, and it only took a few minutes to get up to speed on the syntax.
Tighter control of cell data usage ahead for AT&T
> Debatable. Women in the West were forced into work due to declining wages. A single income was no longer enough to support a family, and as more women went to work the other families would bid up the price of goods.

That is debatable. A bigger problem is that living standards increased significantly. To keep these living standards (two cars per household, etc...) two people must work.
Increase Signups by Adding Video to Your Page
Ready, Set, Go
Google recently publicly released their new programming language, Go. I’ve known about this for some time, having worked for the big G while it was in development, although not directly involved.

Google has plenty of special purpose languages, but this is the first general purpose language to come out of Mountain View. That fact alone makes it quite interesting. Add to it that some of the original C and UNIX people are involved, and it becomes something that requires investigation.

What’s it for, you ask?
On behalf of every autodidact here, thank you for publishing those publicly.

Cheers!
It really annoys me when non-believers attempt to psychoanalyze those of us who are. They inevitably attempt to rationalize away our beliefs in an attempt to justify their own and in so doing, seem to make all sorts of assumptions of what believers (of all sorts) actually believe. This essay is no exception.

For example: The author says that people who believe in a here-after should be more willing to take risks (many are) but he doesn't take into account that many faiths consider unnecessary risks to be sinful in the same way that suicide is sinful, just to a much lesser degree. Also, regardless of what you believe about the after-life, death still signals the end of this one, which everyone is attached to in some way or another.

It's similar with lost loved-ones. Often, when one mourns a loved one, it's due more to the personal loss of no longer being able to be with that person than to feeling sorry for the person.

I could go on, but this is enough.
An open letter to Eric Schmidt
Did you try both? Can you work better on your internet-hooked box?
Battery made from plain copier paper
It seems to be out of print: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633439/ . $95 second hand... Is it worth it?
How will you make money with this site? I don't think using it is enough of a value add for people that you'll ever see the tremendous amount of traffic necessary these days to earn even a small amount of money from advertising.
Thanks for this! Looking into it.
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88189
Boot Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 from USB Stick