skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure what you're calling spurious or anonymous by way of blog posts but do you have any references with respect to UN definitions? According to Wikipedia - depending on how reliable you consider them to be (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality):

"The exclusion of any high-risk infants from the denominator or numerator in reported IMRs can be problematic for comparisons. Many countries, including the United States, Sweden or Germany, count an infant exhibiting any sign of life as alive, no matter the month of gestation or the size, but according to United States Centers for Disease Control researchers,[6] some other countries differ in these practices. All of the countries named adopted the WHO definitions in the late 1980s or early 1990s,[7] which are used throughout the European Union.[8] However, in 2009, the US CDC issued a report which stated that the American rates of infant mortality were affected by the United States' high rates of premature babies compared to European countries and which outlines the differences in reporting requirements between the United States and Europe, noting that France, the Czech Republic, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Poland do not report all live births of babies under 500 g and/or 22 weeks of gestation.[6][9][10] However, the report also concludes that the differences in reporting are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the United States’ relatively low international ranking.[10]"

An additional datapoint (pdf): http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012...

Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health Care System at Fault? Samuel H. Preston & Jessica Ho

Abstract: "Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system."
I got a Kindle as a gift too and I love it as well. I highly recommend you play with it or at least borrow someone's (if they'll let you) if you doubt you'll like it.

"Inside Steve's Brain" - Great book on the history of Apple, and the inner workings of the company and the philosophy.

"Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi on the importance of networking and building relationships.

"Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't"

"The Pixar Touch" Great history of Pixar and how they came about.

"Call me Ted" - Ted Turner's autobiography

"How the Mighty Fall" Jim Collins
Great find, maybe the submitter can change the link ?
Good point...poor lifestyle drives healthcare costs up. It would be interesting to see fast food spending or avg calories/day on top of this chart.
This is a terrible graph. It took me five minutes to figure out how everything is related. Data such as this is much more naturally plotted as an x-y scatter-plot. Thickness of the datapoints could indicate number of doctor visits. Instead, the graph eliminates the x-axis, but retains the space. Very strange choice.
yeah, twilio seems pretty cool, and i'm looking at it for another voice/political project. but it's basically an api for level 3 with some nifty features tacked on, so for a project as voice-heavy as a predictive dialer that doesn't need the extra features, i'm guessing it makes more sense to find a developer with voice experience and avoid the markup and the added layer of potential problems. if somebody with twilio or other voice experience is listening, i'd love to get another opinion.
The url is http://localhost/ :-)

No seriously, since there was no income model, and I was generally quite fed up and didn't see a future of the project I didn't see any value in leaving it up.
it's a great graph to illustrate how f-up healthcare in US is.

however, may I point out that life expectancy at birth is pretty poor measure of healthcare efficiency.

japanese are living very long lives, but it is no secret that depression and suicide is the major problem there, especially in younger generations.
gotta love that, right? i'm figuring that once this is built really well for political applications that i'll take it to commercial market as well and deal with all the regulations at that point. commercial clients can provide a nice stabilizing business stream to balance out the comings and goings of political campaigns.
For an extremely loose sense of the term physical violence perhaps. In any case, I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find a single case of Copyright enforcement in the United States (or any other first world society in modern history) where physical violence was used.

As such, it does misrepresent the GPL. The author is implying that anyone who uses the GPL wants to hurt you and your family. And that is absurd.
Apple tablet release
should be soon because jobs needs it to battle kindle for the ebook market. it'll be a very refined successor to the failed promise of ipaq and windows mobile. this will have the same effect on the way people utilize desktops/laptops as the cell phone did for landline handsets (who has a landline anymore?). can't wait to see it hacked and running nix.
Mathematical Basis of Hallucinations
I agree with your overall point that the U.S. medical system suffers from overregulation. We could (and should) allow more primary care to be performed by, for instance, qualified nurses, RNs, and nurse-practitioners. As you point out, the existing guilds hate this idea.

But your first point needs some correction. Health insurance is only tax-deductible when it's paid for by your employer. [EDIT: Just noticed you mention this lower down, but your first paragraph gives a misleading impression.]

This is perverse in multiple ways. There's the way you mention: that it subsidizes health care over other forms of compensation, so we wind up spending more on health care than we would otherwise.

But also, with particular relevance to HN, it subsidizes employment over other kinds of work. If you leave your job to start a startup, you lose a substantial tax advantage.
Private military companies.
I agree that it's unfamiliar, but once you've figured out how to read it, it strikingly demonstrates the degree to which the U.S. is an outlier.
Since you asked... I subscribe to a school of political philosophy known as agorism:

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

Call it libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism if you like. Close enough.

Now, that implies that I believe copyright to be an immoral distribution monopoly founded in infamy and, like all state-granted privileges, ultimately enforced at the point of a gun:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027905

Naturally, I believe we'd be (and that we will be) much better off without it:

http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-P552.as...

Obviously, I would expect no more than about 10% of readers to be prepared to agree with me, since that's about the typical proportion of individualists to collectivists ;-)
I am not making any claims, however. I am not claiming the opposite approach (closed source?) is the best. I am simply ensuring that most software I write is available for everyone, period. It could be used in a GPL project, a closed source project, or a BSD project. I am not even advocating a license position. My only goal is to help society by lessoning the work required by others, since they can freely use my code. A license like the MIT license maximizes that goal as far as I can see.

I am content with admitting that I do not know the "best" model. And I am not opposed to releasing work under other licenses at other times. I have even released under the GPL in the past, but for political reasons.

If you think I am a license warrior, you are incorrect.
Regarding point 4, what would prevent a drug company from claiming that, say, Aspirin could cure AIDS? I do not think that is a stretch, either. If companies can profit from selling pills to increase penis length, I see no reason why they wouldn't make other claims if they were legal.

I do not trust in the market to correct unverified claims; many people want to believe in miracle cures, and will buy snake oil despite others decrying it as such.
I believe HN is an effective example. Your karma are your points. Comments and votes give you feedback.And you also collect submissions.
Last but one = penultimate
Listening to just the Euro OBs seems no better or worse to me than just listening to the US OBs. I was initially going to suggest that you also speak with US OBs, but then realized that it's not really possible to just decide to do it one morning without purchasing expensive tickets, etc. But I do hope that you'll agree that the pitfalls of one-sidedness apply to both sides.

Regarding standardization, it does not seem to me to obviate the problem of comparison between unequals in this case. I know you are familiar with these concepts since you referenced them, but I will provide them for other readers; here are the WHO definitions relevant to neonatal mortality:

"The neonatal period commences at birth and ends 28 completed days after birth.

Live birth refers to the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy, which, after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life - e.g. beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles - whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached. Each product of such a birth is considered live born."

The key is that live birth counts irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy. Viability begins around 23 weeks with extraordinary measures (give or take, depending on how aggressive your care may be). Depending on your approach, aggressive care may improve such statistics (if the care is aggressive only after live birth), or worsen such statistics (if aggressive care also occurs prior to live birth and includes things such as induction).

So (a) I think it's actually quite a muddled issue, and (b) I could see aggressive care pushing these stats either way, depending on the timing and methodology of care. It's a legitimate issue that well-meaning people are interested in (in contrast to those who feel that family planning is a step away from forced abortions, who are simply ideologues).
Out of interest how beefy are the servers you are using to run nginx ? We're looking at it for a deployment and I'm wondering if you had any tips about whether it's a particularly RAM or CPU-hungry beast ?
I consider it a decision based on taste. It is a core value to me that my code should not be used in proprietary software if I'm not getting paid. From this personal preference, I only need to use rationality to decide to use GNU GPL instead of the BSD license.
My claim wasn't that it's unfamiliar - which it is - but that's it's terrible. What's striking is the data, not the visualization applied to that data. I think the effect would be just as dramatic with an x-y scatter plot, and it would have the benefit of being easier to read.

This graph also eliminates seeing if there is a correlation between money spent per individual and life expectancy. On a scatter plot, if there was a correlation, we would expect to see the data fall in some line. If a data point was outside of that line, then it would be obvious.
Wasn't that hard - if you follow the http://www.tampatrib.com link at the bottom of the original article, it's staring you right in the face.

There are also similar articles back to 2005, which might be good to see whether the items that the Tribune picked turned out to be important or not.
No, I agree, my intent was to point out an internal inconsistency within the critique.
I've added a few HTML5 form helpers to this gem:

http://github.com/stephencelis/rerails/tree/2-3-stable

So something like this would do the trick:

<%= f.email_field :email %>
"It is his stance on law overall that is extreme: the position of anarchy."

That's probably because I'm an anarchist. Specifically, an anarcho-capitalist.
i left a comment about that on the post that this thread is linked to. check it out.
Ah, yes, now I see it. Weird though how they actually had that information and then decided to leave it out of the article, that's a serious devaluation for no good reason at all.
They trust their doctors. In the rest of the world there are not the restrictions on drugs that are found in the USA. Also, what about all the people that could be saved by a medicine that have nothing to lose if it doesn't work since they have no other options -- right now they SOL. The amount of people that die because they cannot receive medicines that may work is staggering and a great injustice.
"So I dunno. A lot of the excesses that led to this have been trimmed, but things are so much more fragile now that it takes a lot less to set us off on a downward spiral."

What I worry about is that if no laws have changed, soon as people start to feel safe again the Banks will start making sub prime loans and dividend trading will back to where it was.

Is the only thing stopping this personal responsibility? Companies are going to prey on the uninformed, do the same things they did in the first half of this decade and hope to get out before it collapses again?
where do you get this data? it is wrong. nowhere near 80% of zynga's revenues come from farmville. i won't say more than that because it is nobody's business. but it is not even close to 80%.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...

How many of those would put you close enough to the original research that you wouldn't care to dig deeper?
Statistics about Palestinian
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation.

It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.
The fundamental energy advances of the past 12 months
Love the topology graphs. I might have to steal some features :). Hurray open source!
The surprising history of copyright and the promise of a post-copyright world
Do you have data on the number of people who die because the FDA has not approved a drug that may save their life? Note that this is different from people who die because they can't afford treatment.

I would be more comfortable with point 4 if we once again banned prescription drug advertisements.
I agree. Ideally, pure CSS is certainly the way to go, but it's not yet supported well enough to be used exclusively IMHO in every situation. I get a kick out seeing "savvy" people demand "table-less" web development, but with no mention of cross-compatibility or w3c validity.
This one surprised me:

"Analysis of Greenland ice samples shows Europe froze solid in less than 12 months 12,800 years ago, partly due to a slowdown of the Gulf Stream. Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years."

Scared me a little too since I'm from Northern Europe...

Does anyone know where to find more information or the original research?
You provided no evidence to back up your point originally, and so it came off as a drive-by "I am an anti-feminist troglodyte who is either trolling or hopelessly incapable of thought" comment; both cases merit a downvote.
Probably the easiest would be to work with a blacklist for 'popular' science publications and blogs, and a whitelist for places where original research would be published.

The 'elsevier' link would be the only one left from that page then, and that's the real deal.

This starts to look like it is a really nice weekend project.

Anybody have experience with writing browser plug ins ?

Greasemonkey script even maybe ?
I've plans to write about both as I review the books I read in 2009 on my blog, but nothing I can put into coherent form here and right now, sorry.
And the conclusion is that it is slower than the original version of the vertex but it is still faster in writes compared to the G2 ~140MB/s vs 109MB/s where the original vertex SSD was able to get 185MB/s.

FTA:
Presumably the majority of your file writes aren’t going to be compressed files so your performance shouldn’t be gated by this issue, even then I’ve shown that you shouldn’t be any worse off than you would be with Intel’s X25-M.
That's dumb. So many "tell HN" threads or "Ask HN" threads require you to post a link. And people already abuse the first post privilege in some cases anyway.
funny you ask. i just posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027584.
I use both. For the most part I stay in Numbers but for other many things Excel on the Mac is still better then numbers. For example, Quickbooks will export reports directly into Excel but not into Numbers. Also the 'Text to Columns' feature works better in Excel then in Numbers. In general I think Excel is a more powerful program then Numbers. However on the Windows side Excel beats both mac applications hands down.
10 predictions for the world of January 1, 2020
"First, the sites I was using to draw in users blocked my profiles ... worse they had put mechanisms in place that prohibited me from making new profiles."

I want to know what this guy was doing to get banned like this; such treatment is usually reserved only for the most serious of spammers.
I went ahead and made one. http://steamcommunity.com/groups/hackernews
Because of the way in which nginx is implemented, it is simply impossible for nginx to hang because of dead / not responding backend. In such case nginx will send either 502 Bad Gateway or 504 Gateway Time-out error response.
Where he published the article is funny. Who cares about theories? A pox on all their houses. His core observations are unassailable:

* The bankers' pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society

* It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers ... retirees ... or taxpayers.

* Those who had preached fiscal restraint when it came to small welfare programs for the poor now clamored for the world's largest welfare program

Our 'leadership' has failed us repeatedly. The appropriate response is obvious.
great article. the final point is crucial: there needs to be a separate level, between normal and no-fly, that is relatively easy to trigger, for special screening. the "fire hose" of intelligence needs to be connected to that, and it's an almost-real-time problem (eg. paying with cash just before the flight).
Census uses partnerships to count hard-to-reach people
I built a service on top of EC2/Asterisk that did political phone polling. Not really polling though as much as voter ID, we'd push out 100,000 calls into a congressional district and campaigns would use the resulting data for targeted mail and GOTV. It was all point and click-- write your poll and record it with a flash plugin-- stupidly simple. After the 2008 election I shut it down, largely due to getting to work with so many politicians and realizing how totally worthless human beings most of them are. Seriously, how the fuck these people are writing laws is beyond me.

And yeah, the laws are total bullshit. If I revive the project my plan is to have a massive list of phone numbers as well as a list of congressman's offices, personal cell phones, children's cell phone numbers, mistresses, etc. Whenever an important vote comes up you call your people and give them a very short briefing on the issue and then connect the call through to the appropriate number. Because you can control the call throttling you can lock up phone lines and it would be about 100x more effective than traditional calling campaigns. Ron Paul 2012.
Second the income model we were using was made illegal
because of a new law that was hurried through parlaiment
due to issues unrelated to us. This was the definitive
blow. With no near-term prospect of turnover in a
country where it isn't easy to go out and get external
investors aboard there's nothing more you can do.

What kind of business model was it? Can't really think of anything "illegal" you could even do with a social network website
1. The structure of an unstrained free-market medical system is well-suited for rent-seeking rackets. Doctors and hospitals tend to be monopolies. Even with competition, few are competent at choose between competitors, etc. This situation has historically been restrained by modest regulation and by the fact that most people entering health care are motivated by the desire to help others. These restraints are gone.

2. The current situation is neither "over regulation" nor "under regulation". It is mis-regulation. But all the regulation or lack-of regulation in the world won't really prevent a determined group of racketeers/rent-seekers aiming for their accustomed level of sales and profits through their monopoly position. There just aren't enough honest dollars in health care to incentivize the currrent system into being efficient. Making the existing system "work" is akin buying La Cosa Nostra spreadsheets and hoping this will turn it into an honest business. Reform at this juncture is like saying "can't you only restrain the growth in fraudulent loans just a bit". When the housing bubble was high, even the growth couldn't be stopped. Now, the decay can't be hidden.

3. It's not "The Doctors" or "the insurance companies" or "the hospitals" that are the problem but all of these and none these. There are indeed "good parts" and "bad parts" in the drug, hospital, doctoring and insurance industries. But the "bad parts" are far to too adaptable for efforts at restraining them piecemeal to work. From the chart in the article, you'd have to deduce the parasitic parts of US health care get at least twice the sales of the parts needed for a sane health care system and quite possibly four or five times that.

4. The point is NOT how we will correct the excesses of the current health care system. The question is when the growth of the current excesses will reach the point when they are truly unsustainable. The current "reform" wave seems aimed to enlisting the state primarily in the task of squeezing more money out of those who weren't paying into the racket (the uninsured). Well, once they've run of people to squeeze and health care cost go from 20% to 30% of GDP, there won't be any further place for the cancer to go but down. I'm guessing that's five to ten more years. Will our economy last that long? We'll see.

5. There are free market solutions that could work and single-payer solutions that could work. It's shame we won't see either kind of sanity for a while.
You consider me "anti-feminist" why? Casual sex and strong-man polygamy are about as anti-feminist as it gets, rooted in the concept of women as a resource to be sexually exploited.
If you are self-employed you can deduct your insurance as a business expense, Schedule C.
Interesting that this broke out the religious and secular giving. I've always heard the statistic that religious people giving more, but I always wondered if most of that was in tithes. Apparently it's not.
Scheme Videos (Lectures and Talks)
Even if they were aiming for low cost, I wouldn't blame them for marketing the thing as high performance given that it's currently #1.
Regarding point 3, do most other countries have more relaxed licensing requirements?