skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A response to the graphic suggests that while "this was evidence of an insane and inefficient healthcare system", "if [they] really wanted a chart that captures what’s wrong with America’s healthcare system, [they] should have gone to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ national health expenditures data website and downloaded the figures showing how rampant third-party payment has resulted in consumers directly paying for less than 12 percent of healthcare costs. And when people are purchasing something with (what is perceived to be) other people’s money, it’s understandable that they don’t pay much attention to cost." (http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/29/the-real-healthcare-char...)

I'm sympathetic to this argument given that the American healthcare system is considerably different than many healthcare systems globally in that private insurers acting on behalf of employers (not the users of healthcare) pick up a significant portion of the pie (even if, on a per capita basis, Medicare spending is more than most countries like Canada - though this fact alone begs the question of why the US government wouldn't first seek to fix Medicare).

As a Canadian, the one thing I don't quite understand is how many of my countrymen are so quick to condemn the American system despite all the obvious signs that the Canadian system is unsustainable and failing (http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive...). Further, you read about Animal farm like anecdotes (to be fair, I've seen first hand some of this in Canada as well), and you wonder whether or not healthcare systems abroad can really be distinctly categorized between those that are "universal" and "non-universal" given how radically different implementation is - an example from Japan here: http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2010/01/my_family_the_v....

There are at least 2 other big problems with this graph if presumably it's being used to argue for changes in policy:

(1) The measurement of life expectancy "at birth". The US spends a considerable amount of money aggressively attempting to treat what would otherwise be considered stillborns.
(2) The lifestyles of Americans that may have nothing at all to do with healthcare implementation (http://www.usnews.com/health/family-health/articles/2008/04/...) - ie this could very well mean that if the US miraculously grew an entirely public and universal healthcare system as modeled against XYZ country, US life expectancy might not necessarily get any cheaper or better - it is entirely possible that it would become more expensive and worse.
His own replies to his google groups posting are just as bizarre. Sadly, this looks authentic.
um, wow, how did i miss that??
That would be very neat indeed, the problem would be to figure out what the 'original research' was in the midst of lots of fluff around it. Plenty of times articles will be 10% citations from the original but ranking higher in google because they don't link to the original stuff but do get linked themselves.

If you could crack that though it would be awesome.
What you link to are tests using the server VM but without warmup. You need to select "Java 6 steady-state" to get the warmup.

[Edit] Actually the state-state one averages over multiples restarts including JITed and non-JITed runs.
That's an awesome and persuasive infographic. In fact, it's main fault is that it's trying too hard to be persuasive. Putting the US above the legend detracts from the power of the raw data and strikes me as being unnecessarily editorial.
Oh I must be stupid. I spent a good three minutes trying to find where the United States was because I scrolled down.
Negativity: A flaming bag of crap on the entrepreneur's porch
I've used YUI, extjs, jqueryui etc. and all of them are good for what they do. My point was that these tools need to be natively supported by browsers so I don't have to worry about incorporating any additional UI library for basic apps. If the listbox (html SELECT) exists as an html element, why not a combo box?
How so? Copyleft has always said "you are free to do things our way." That's the entire intent and why proponents of the idea like to write Free with a capital, to distinguish from the usual definition of the word.
well there goes the next 4 hours of my life. the math ones are pretty neat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_number
This is a neat list but skewed towards fun facts rather than substantial research. I would love to see a list of the biggest findings of the year, ranked in importance by scientists.
http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~cchen/ctutor.pdf

A little dated, yes, although I guess dosbox and turbo c would help with running the examples. But still one of the best beginner C tutorials ever. His explanation of pointers alone is worth the read.
So you probably don't need thousands, you probably need on the order of several 10's or so to get through once.

And the underbomber's gang will get, supposing that they can try repeatedly - what? - Three goes tops before the hammer comes down on them.
The problem with the Health Care debate is that it's become so polarized that advocates of Single Payer won't admit its failures in other countries while those opposed to Single Payer won't admit we have a problem.

Graphs like this are designed to create a visceral response but rationally they mean very little if not accompanied by an item by item breakdown of why the numbers are what they are.

For example, the Canadian system puts price limits on patented medicines while the U.S. system does not. That has nothing to do with being a Single Payer system but is definitely a factor that contributes to higher costs in the U.S.
I came expecting points addressing ATTs shortfalls in service, and how they plan on improving. That's not what I got, unfortunately.
Also after a visit to a psychiatrist I found out they charge your insurance more, if you have it, than they would if you didn't. I'm not exactly sure what that was about, but if it was for sympathy, then it just shows that having a bureaucratic insurance company, private or government owned, would still have this problem of distancing the money from the patient.

However I'm still a large proponent of not only life as a right, but healthcare too.
Thanks for the story, I read it with great interest because I can really relate (like many around these parts I'm sure).

I'm glad to see that you found the energy to see your project through until the end, even if it didn't work out eventually. It probably cost you quite a bit, but that's the name of the game. You can't know until you try (well that's what I keep telling myself these days).

You're right that the combination of friends and work especially is a delicate one, something that I did not foresee either (working on my first big project).

Also I agree with your advice, about needing co-founders that are as engaged as you are. However this is a very hard thing to achieve. Not everyone is as crazy as we are. And communicating a vision is a very hard thing to do as well.

Although it might not seem so for someone with not much prior experience with coding, the simplest thing to do is still to have a go at it alone, at least in a first stage. It's probably easier and less risky than managing a team to execute your crazy idea for you.

Anyway, don't leave us hanging! What is the url of your website?
15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years
I wonder if this controls for various other lifestyle choices.

I find it ironic that the government spends so much money subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, and then spends even more treating the health problems that result from it. If we didn't have an agricultural system that makes unhealthy food cheap and healthy food expensive, perhaps we wouldn't have quite so many obesity-related illnesses.

Same thing with parking lots and interstates being subsidized while dense urban development (walkable/bikeable neighborhoods) is not. Cars kill a lot of people outright through accidents, and then indirectly through people becoming couch potatoes.

Usually by the time people come under care of the health care, the battle's already been lost. Acute, lifesaving interventions on otherwise healthy people aren't all that expensive. Chronic conditions caused by 40 years of neglect are. I'm curious if we'd get both the cheaper health care and the longer life expectancy of European countries if our cities were laid out like theirs and our agricultural system didn't dump massive amounts of subsidies on the corn industry.
We use nginx 0.7.x as a load balancer and have no complaints. A pair balance 25M+ requests a day.

It's certainly not a full-featured load balancer -- nothing like the visibility and control you get with haproxy or similar -- but for us it's never been a problem. Our backends handle up to 100 concurrent requests and we use straight round-robin across a large pool. In ~2 years, nginx has never hung, mis-balanced requests, or skipped a beat. One node failed once because of human error during a binary upgrade, and I was pissed -- I thought I could keep the thing running forever.

Many of the horror stories I used to see on the nginx lists were in cases where each backend could only handle one request at a time, which I think was the genesis of upstream_fair. I suspect this is a big reason for the bad load balancing reputation.

What's missing is easily taking servers out of rotation and non-trivial health checks. Both can be done with config file changes, and nginx's graceful restart mechanism is very robust. But there's no side-channel for changing upstreams on the fly.

nginx + haproxy is a fine choice if you need more control, and I've seen haproxy on both sides. Haven't used SSL support in haproxy, but it's good in nginx.
"40. The speed of U.S Internet broadband lags far behind other industrial nations, including Japan, Finland, South Korea, France and Canada."

We knew that last year, AT&T. I believe the government handed you some billions of dollars to do something about that years ago.
Ouch... hope you get better soon then, that can really ruin a week or more if you're unlucky. I hate that feeling, when your brain turns to mush and you can't think clearly.
Before I had image verification, and all the details required at sign up. Now users can fill in their extra details later.
Right. The point of copyleft is not to give things away free to everybody, but to change the power dynamics of the market by affording some competitive advantage to community developments. The end vision of this is the creation of best-of-breed tools and content that are available to all and, as a result, raise collective productivity.
How many of you are looking for your next startup?
Just curious how many are not involved in a startup currently, but in the thinking/planning (not coding) stage.
Decision theory and the Underpants bomber
Ah, spurious comparisons and anonymous blog posts - is there nothing you can't obscure?

The US spends considerable amount of money aggressively attempting to treat what would otherwise be considered stillborns.

I regret to inform you that this particular meme is without foundation. I have had extensive discussions with UK and Euro obstetricians about it and the story that there is some massively divergent standard of care or different administrative classification for births involving medical complications is complete BS, from the same people who go about asserting that family planning is a single step away from forced abortions. The measurement of statistics for things like live births and so forth rely on standardized UN definitions, same as US statistics.
In addition to Smalltalk, the APL family (including J and K) do this too. It doesn't cause serious problems while writing code; once you get used to it, it's a whole lot simpler. It does, however, create a barrier to mainstream acceptance. So it seems to me your decision depends on how badly you want the latter.
I'd like expand on this a bit. For me, what is distasteful about the GPL is the presumption that "our philosophy is the best one, lets lock in now." That is a position I cannot agree with. There are practical concerns about the sustainability of the GPL model in terms of economics.

Programmers can not work for free. The usual claim that GPL proponents make is either "sell service, not software" or the ransom model where you GPL source only after you collect X amount for the production of it. They are interesting claims, but far from proven on a large scale.

When I write code and wish to give it out for free, I want it to be available for all times and all models of work. What happens if it is one day determined that having all source under a GPL model is simply not sustainable in a realistic setting? That code is now locked forever into that model. For larger projects, it is impractical to track down every single committer in order to change the license.

I even question the idea in terms of attracting new developers. How many people really start writing GPL code because of the existing base of software rather than because they agree with the idea of the GPL? It is yet another unproven claim.

In short, I find the philosophy behind the GPL to be faith based rather than a sceptical scientific position. The goals and claims made by GPL proponents are completely unproven.
One might argue that (up to a point) this justly represents the cost of administering the patient's insurance claim, whereas the patient who pays cash is only charged the cost of treatment and does not incur any administrative overhead.
Anyone here planning on being in the 6 month program?

I would have loved to do it, but the monthly trip out to SFO from BOS is problematic.
It's hard to judge the significance of findings until well after the fact. Science is a process, not just a series of papers.
Virtual tractors in fv only have one supplier. Therefore the pricing will be monopolistic and would not trend to zero.
The Essential Startup Reader: 10 Lessons In Entrepreneurship
Do I really need to point out the ways? Agree or disagree with CopyLeft, this is just extreme:

- Applying the coercive machinery of the state in this way always boils down to the threat of physical violence for non-compliance.

- [you've] given men with guns a pretext for tearing apart a life, or lives

- I have no interest whatsoever in wreaking havoc on people who want to use my code

- Not only copyleft advocates but anybody affixing a licensing statement to open-source software is guilty of ... magical thinking
Of course he has built his reputation on it - I've probably learned half of what I know about defense-in-depth from Schneier. The thing is, when it comes to aviation security, he has a tendency to discount the importance of preventing bad things from getting on airplanes, and over emphasize the importance of preventing bad people from getting on airplanes.

I think they are both important. The TSA clearly thinks the "prevent bad things from getting on airplanes" is a more containable problem. We have the NSA/CIA/FBI and other intelligence services that will work on the bad-people problem, which in no way means we can't simultaneously dedicate resources to the "bad things on airplane problem."

As an aside, our last line of defense is clearly "Prevent Bad people from doing bad things on airplanes" - which is how both the christmas underwear bomber and the shoe bomber were stopped.
The more information authorities have to deal with the bigger the chance they'll miss the needles. After all, there is a relatively constant number of needles, make a bigger haystack and you've only made it harder to find the needles.

What they need is better information, not more of it.

Tightening the screws on things like no-fly lists is only useful if the underlying information gets much better than it is today, right now the number of false positives is so high that you're essentially looking at the boy that cried wolf once too many.

Maybe this guy did trip a flag, maybe he didn't (he should have, but that's after the fact). The problem is that on the day that he flew probably 10's if not 100's of people were actually flagged and searched as false positives, and that's one of the many reasons why this false negative managed to slip through the maze.

Another thing that this clearly demonstrates is a total communications failure between agencies, and that's not exactly news. As always, the information was there for the taking but because of the high number of links between the people that act and the people that know nothing was done with the information.

edit: And because of political correctness a lot of time is wasted on searching people that are picked at random when openly profiling would probably be much more effective but will be shouted down immediately, so the system actually has to waste a lot of time and effort just to avoid being accused of racism.

As someone else pointed out (paraphrased) the day that old white rich people start blowing up airliners we have a real problem.

Also, every day there are probably worried parents that call in that their son is about to become a radical, and 99% of the time you probably never hear from those people again.

An interesting thing I noticed is that plenty of these terrorists seem to be rejecting their parents wealth and become willing victims for radicalization, I wonder if there isn't a deeper psychological parallel that might be used to identify this 'kind' of wannabe mass murderer, after all if the terrorist groups can uncover these characters with some regularity others should be able to do the same, then either get to them first and give them some psychological anti-dote or use it to figure out the risk at a later date.
As a Canadian, the one thing I don't quite understand is how many of my countrymen are so quick to condemn the American system despite all the obvious signs that the Canadian system is unsustainable and failing

Canadians' responses to the US are not a rational phenomenon. They're rooted in our identity issues and aren't amenable to argument. This is a (the?) fundamental fact of (English) Canadian history right from the beginning.

It doesn't follow that all our responses are wrong; as far as I can tell they tend to fall along a spectrum. But it's a real weakness that we can't be more objective. It leads us to accept and defend substandard things about ourselves that we could otherwise set about improving... your example being exhibit #1.
The original article does have links - not necessarily to the research itself, but still much better than this one.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/dec/27/na-50-things/news-me...
When evaluating product/business decisions I use what I call the live-or-die criteria. Will my company (or product, in this case) live or die by this decision?

If not, move on to something more important.

HTML tables vs. CSS is one of those decisions that really doesn't matter. No product has ever failed because they used HTML tables, so why worry about it? Use whichever helps you get the job done faster.
A few here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/july-dec09/yeari...
Concern as China clamps down on rare earth exports
They ought to be zero were it in any way a sensible market, but it's not. I think people buying that stuff are a bit batty.
The Palestinian Perspective (Google Tech Talks)
Google Tech Talks
February 17, 2009

ABSTRACT

When I first visited the Palestinian territories, I was afraid I would have to hide my identity as an American and possibly wear a headscarf. To my surprise, I was warmly welcomed exactly as I was, and after more than two years living and working there, it remains one of my favorite spots on earth. The people are charming and generous, the landscape is gorgeous, and the parties, concerts, and beer gardens in Ramallah are world-class.

But behind all this looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels -- which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.

Using photographs, stories, and statistics, this presentation colors in the Palestinian experience, with all its complexity and contradictions, as it is rarely shown on the news or in books. It is a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together -- a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.

Speaker: Pamela Olson
Pamela Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor. She interviewed the first elected female mayor in the West Bank, witnessed the 2005 Disengagement from inside the Gaza Strip, and served as the foreign press coordinator for Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi's Presidential campaign against Mahmoud Abbas in January 2005. She later worked for a year at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC. She is now writing a book about her time in the West Bank called Fast Times in Palestine.
The opposite approach isn't proven either. In other words, there is no data on the issue. So you too are, in essence, making a decision based on faith. Although I can't find a recent source, it has historically been the case, and probably still is, that the GPL is the most popular open source license.

Not everyone who uses the GPL or advocates in favor of the GPL believes it should be the only license. I suspect hardly anyone does. Unfortunately people let their opinions of RMS cloud this debate.

The argument that the GPL prevents people from turning a profit is not a sound one. Any business model available under a non GPL license is available under a GPL license as well. Additionally, the dual license model becomes a viable option when using the GPL.
It's nothing to do with sympathy. Many businesses try to charge different prices to different consumers based on ability to pay. If you charge a single fixed price, you'll miss out on some sales (to people who'd buy your product at a lower price) and on some profits (from people who'd pay more than you're charging). It's the same phenomenon behind coupons, sales, 'premium' and 'budget' versions, etc. etc. From a provider's point of view, the fact that someone does or doesn't have insurance is an important signal about what s/he'll pay for medical services, and they're rational to take advantage of it.
Much better link. Bolding has such a big impact in these types of lists.
It's an odd way of looking at things, but not incorrect. If you refuse repeatedly to submit to law, physical violence is the necessary end result. What he does misrepresent is that his rant is true of all application of law. I certainly do not think anyone would seriously claim all use of law is bad.

At any rate, it does not misrepresent the GPL. It describes it fairly well. It is his stance on law overall that is extreme: the position of anarchy.