skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is depressing. If I am about to die, I will pay whatever you want to charge. And if you collude with others, my negotiating position is toast. In addition, as a free citizen I am always able to invent a treatment that is so expensive that my fellow countrymen can't afford it. That's the nature of being a free person. Yet my fellow countrymen seem to be pretty pissed at this and are threatening to take whatever treatments I might invent and distribute them to the needy. You can call it socialism, but it's also just populist politics.

All this means that traditional market principles don't map exactly in the world of health care (I think they mostly map, just not exactly)

If I am not about to die, but I'm not paying my bills, then you're no longer providing me a service -- you're providing it to whoever is paying. And they're just playing numbers games trying to keep making more than they are spending.

There are some real, serious, foundational problems with health care. None of the current proposals by any party will even begin to fix them. What we're going to end up with, unfortunately, is a situation like every other big political problem -- the politicians will get more votes arguing about it and keeping it broken than they will actually fixing it. So it will remain broken.

Sorry -- not cheering you up so far, huh?

I could spitball some possible solutions. Make it illegal for anybody to pay my medical bills except myself, my family, and charities. Require all doctors to perform 2 years of public health service instead of some of the internships they are currently doing. Have a national standard definition of all medical procedures and require all health providers to publicly post prices for those procedures. Take the percentage of people who cannot afford treatment each year and require all health providers to provide that percentage of free service.

Of course none of that will ever happen.

I will say something political simply because it amazes me: the party who is on television right now demonizing the insurance and pharmaceutical companies is also the party that cut deals with these same industries to limit imported drugs and not have a public option. This virtually guarantees that those industries will be printing money for the foreseeable future. If I told you this five years ago you'd call me a fantastical liar. It's incredible.
An open-source project is more than the code. It also includes the community and the resources for continuing development. Although the code is under the GPL, Sun (and now possibly Oracle) has control of the brand and many of the potential revenue streams. A fork would lack the benefit of a clear, centralized community and many resources to fund development. Both of these things threaten the future of MySQL as an open-source project.
Suggest HN: Standard file locations for website info
It would be nice, for automation, to standardize information locations.

For example, the standard logo for a company could always be at http://website.com/images/logo.png Perhaps there could be multiple sizes of logos that are standard as well.

You could also have contact information always at /contact or /contactus

I'm not so concerned about the actual urls as I am the desire to start a convention like this that we can all use moving forward. How many times have we pasted a link to our logo or uploaded our logo? Or a company asked for it for an article or testimonial, etc...

If we could just specify a base url to grab the information, from any service we choose pretty much, then life would be a lot easier for us all.
> specifically the anti-atheists

I am not one of those. I think the Bible actually specifically teaches that this is not the case due to something called the "common grace." There's a Wikipedia article about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_grace). You can pull that out next time you meet an anti-atheist from the Christian camp (although I have never met someone like that).

Also the wars in the name of deities thing is bull. I am not a student of history, but in the secular school I attended growing up the history books typically taught that these wars were normally based on geopolitical aspirations. IF you believed the "wars in the name of deities" argument, you might be tempted to believe that Muslim extremism was the cause of recent terrorist bombings (buying into the "they hate our freedom" line of thought), but that too is false. Those bombing us are doing so because of specific actions that our country has taken against their people, like keeping military bases in Saudi Arabia, oppressing the people of Iran, and other things we have done.
I'm surprised at the appeals to emotion engendered in your word choices -- "fairness" and "benevolence".

I don't think either applies. The GPL is primarily useful as a means to maintain a very specific business model that relies on selling commercial licenses. There's nothing moralistic or benevolent or "fair" about it -- it's simply business.

The only moral argument I could possibly make is that it's disingenuous if not outright hypocritical to claim that the GPL is about "freedom" when its used as merely a business tool that leverages the closed-source work of others to fund ongoing development.
I don't think facebook has an interest in that - twitter is filtered rss. Friend filtered RSS. If more people would post links and less "Good morning!" then it would be more interesting.
Registry Easy The Most Reliable PC Cleaner Available
I agree -- and I think Monty has no business taking umbrage with the bed he's made -- but it's worth exploring why this is the case.
"However, as indicated by vast market success"

It's far too common that the person who assigns value to software and that signs the check is not the same person who puts it to work.
Because they bought Sun for the hardware-business and Java. They sort-a already have a database, and if selling MySQL to Monty can save them some trouble with a bored EU regulator that gets its kicks from telling US business how to operate, I'm sure they'll be happy to. It'll have to be at market value, though, and it seems a bit like Monty wants a solution where he stays very rich.
Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators [Google Docs PDF]
The fact though is that twitter is mainly a tool to promote yourself. It's mainly a one way broadcast mechanism for one->many.

That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.
As I said below, I'm surprised by the emotional arguments engendered in your word choices -- "fairness", "benevolence", etc.

This is simply business, not ideology. In terms of ideology, I think there's a simply check for whether Sourcefire meets the criteria of "I love the GPL. Except when it applies to me": Sourcefire could not ever include anyone else's GPL code in their own product without breaking their business model.
concurrency is much better in the newest versions
I think the issue is more:

* OK, I update my status fine.
* How do I know who to follow? :/
* Whoah holly crap now I have 1000 tweets from idiots and spam and stupidity, how do I make this usable

etc
Affiliate marketing is more than Amazon and eBay.
The vast majority of the industry is built on continuity models that pay closer to $40 for a purchase of a free trial, which usually results in making $2-$3 per click.

Very few people have actually made serious money with Amazon. Successful affiliates get much better payouts. If anything, I think affiliate marketing OVERvalues the link. When you're making $2-$3 a click, you end up raising PPC bid prices significantly, which ends up forcing out anyone other than affiliates.
I would say that any C programmer worth his salt (unlike me) knows how to profile the code under a meaningful workload and how to optimize it to be faster.

I remember I used the shortest possible integers and the register keyword in the late 80's far too many times to count.

The point of somewhat higher-level languages like Java (I refuse to say Java is a high-level language - it would be one in the late 80s, but not today) is not to make programs run faster, but to make it easier to make them run correctly.
I agree that the GPL is primarily useful as a vehicle for making money off software that is also released as open source. Since open source commercial software is strictly better than closed source commercial software, I don't have a hard time using words like "benevolent" to describe that practice.

Remember, people can still compete with GPL/AGPL software. They just have to do it with open source code.

Finally, your third graf is profoundly disingenuous. Most GPL software is noncommercial. Everything we use to post on HN is traceable in some way back to GCC, which isn't making money for anyone.
Agreed about the need to sync to the web. If I was to undertake a project like this I would probably do it as a web app (to start) using the bleeding edge HTML 5 local storage stuff so you could use it offline. An inability to sync is a deal breaker for me and (probably) the majority of users on HN.

But overall nice presentation!
So you're in the distribution business, like BlockBuster, not in the promotion business like a producing company, or in the storage business, like YouTube. That begins to draw in the focus.

You are looking to distribute marginal-quality videos to the maximum number of people possible. This allows people with unseen work to get noticed (forget follow-up revenues here) As a distributor, then, you are going to have to have some hoops directors are going to have to jump through -- you interest in in your value chain, not in content or indy providers. That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Oddly enough, this might not be a volume play. Or in other words, you might be better off "showing" one movie a month rather than trying to get as many as possible. In fact, the more indy movies you get, the worse it may actually get for you -- remember you are not YouTube -- unless you have some easy way of engaging users and directing them to appropriate content.

Neat business idea. Lots of cool little twists and turns in there. Good luck in the execution!
Tarring people who disagree with you as being mediocre writers or having limited imagination doesn't really encourage a very good discussion.

Personally, I find poor grammar grating. Yes, I can understand what people mean when they make mistakes with its/it's, there/their/they're, there's/there are, your/you're, lesser/fewer, etc...

It's not something I celebrate, though.
"I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)"

For me, the one enduring lesson of Twitter is that if you build something that makes journalists and "public-relations professionals" feel important, you will get lots of free press.
You're arguing that users don't believe the current situation is a fair trade, and would rather enter into a GPL quodque pro quo agreement if they were not restricted by the purchasing department?

Well -- I for one am happy with the licensing status of Mac OS X, and think I've received a perfectly fair trade.
Probably so; it depends how much bureaucratic overhead is imposed upon the medical professional. This might seem selfish, but secretarial services ain't free and time spent filling out claim forms is time that could be used in seeing patients.

Then again, you might argue that some medical professionals make so much anyway they should just eat the overhead as a cost of doing business, but that's a different discussion.
> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool.

This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting).

Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator.

Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
Yes, single civilizations come and go - but the OP you quoted said "civilization", not "this" or "our", which I read as the concept of civilization as such, and I don't see that going anywhere.
And? So what? Sourcefire isn't scavenging Github for code to stick on their boxes; they're writing code, and then (for the most part) publishing it to the world.

From my vantage point, it's the people who produce interesting and valuable code whose interests should come first. Companies who reallllly want to use that code in their for-profit endeavors can buy a license or build their own replacement or open their code; I don't care.
Busy trying to implement an automated image tagger.

It's probably going to last me a bit longer than the weekend though :)

Most fun I've had coding in a while.
But sometimes there is little that you can do about this. My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it.

I agree it can be a useful tool for some but it has yet to sweep through and suck in most of my friends. Who are still on IRC, IM, email... All viable options and for me real time when I want them to be real time.

EDIT: word order ~
A demon's soul, maybe.
Working on my new shopping cart software. I've grown pretty disgusted with most shopping cart options out there, so its time to finally buckle down and finish mine.

IONCart

On Github:
http://github.com/leftnode/ION-Cart

My blog:
http://leftnode.com/progress-on-ioncart-basic-mockups-starte...
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.

I live in the US. I meant to point out that I had talked with euro and UK OBs in addition what I know from living here. More in my other comment.
Now say all that in a single tweet.
Embed images in stylesheets
Not a sustainable business model according to who?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211736

Red Hat is a cop-out example. Why not talk about SourceFire, Sleepycat, Splunk, Hyperic, Zimbra, and Astaro? These are all companies that sell software, GPL their code, and are (or were, before lucrative aquisition) extremely successful. SourceFire IPO'd off their GPL package; the company's name comes from the fact that they're open source.
I agree that the GPL is primarily useful as a vehicle for making money off software that is also released as open source. Since open source commercial software is strictly better than closed source commercial software, I don't have a hard time using words like "benevolent" to describe that practice

I'm not sure I understand your use of "strictly better" here. If my goal is to solve a specific problem, then isn't the software that solves that problem the best strictly better software?

As far as benevolence, why ascribe primarily altruistic motives to clear business decisions? MySQL's use of the GPL allowed for pervasive adoption, which increased demand for commercial licensing and support services.

Finally, your third graf is profoundly disingenuous. Most GPL software is noncommercial. Everything we use to post on HN is traceable in some way back to GCC, which isn't making money for anyone.

How do you think GCC development is paid for? Just take a look at the (closed source, proprietary, et al) companies providing the primary funding ongoing GCC development (although many are moving to or looking at LLVM, since its licensing provides a better model for this sort of shared OSS funding).

It always comes down to money and either commercial interests or government funding.
Many users would be happier with technologies different from the ones endorsed by their managers (frequently after vendor-paid trips to vendor-sponsored events) and anointed as corporate standards that one should not break if one really likes his/her job.

My wife had to build an intranet on top of Sharepoint because a PHB said so. I have to read my e-mails off an Exchange server because corporate IT finds it nice. Far too many servers are Red Hat while I would prefer Debian (I am a fan of APT). Perhaps you have to make your presentations on PowerPoint for Mac, even knowing how much better they would look with Keynote. Life's not perfect.

And, while I love the NeXT side of OSX, I find the Unix side far too early 90's for my taste ;-)
> My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it.

This is similar to Wave as well. Once I got my friends to use Wave, we use it for all kinds of things, from IM to group chat. Except in Wave, I'm not artificially limited to a sentence and a half of typing full of acronyms and shortened links. Heck, I can even inline post images.
Why not talk about SourceFire, Sleepycat, Splunk, Hyperic, Zimbra, and Astaro

All selling services and products around a very specific type of software, selling to a very specific market niche, leveraging both trademarks and non-GPL licensing to do so.

They're not selling the GPL software itself.

Take your Sourcefire example. They fund development by selling proprietary hardware and proprietary licensed IDS rulesets under trademarked names to an enterprise market niche.
It looks like you've already written the app. Most people won't install an app just to review it; however they will visit your site. You should have put the site together first and posted that. Then you'd have feedback before you started building it.
Logo design must be inspired by Hulu.
As such I like it and it seems to be exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for, however there needs to be sync feature and a way for me to view and update my todo list from a browser. Add that and I'm really interested.
I don't believe Facebook made this decision lightly. I'd like to believe that if they found that by releasing this information it placed their users in jeopardy, they wouldn't have done it. Call me naive if you want.

I didn't pay much attention to the whole privacy controls thing. I assume that I am just like millions of other people who just clicked the "Close" button quickly so I could check my wall posts. With that said, I basically operate under the assumption that whatever information I put on that site, its going to be broadcast out to the world. Just like I know that whatever comments I post here on HN can be searched on Google and read by whomever. I think most people in my generation know this.
the difficult part is to filter out the noise to find the 2-3 gems. The home page twitter feed, is the equivalent of having your TV flipping through, 1 channel a second. Except, every few seconds it'll go back to that one spam channel.

the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.
I think you and I are wasting time. You care about making things easier for software users. Software users don't make more software; software authors do. I care about the interests of developers to the exclusion of almost everything else, and I'm also simply not religious about the tools they use to accomplish those aims.

The business benefits of the GPL are so compelling that I don't think they need my cheerleading. If I write 50,000 lines of C code, and you want to stick that code in your $10,000 software package and not pay me a dime, the GPL (for the most part) keeps you from doing that. Total win.
I'm not sure what your point is, or how it counters the author's original point, which is that what's good for the goose is very much not good for the gander.
Although I would expect that to be true, It doesn't appear to be. This post doesn't break out profit by specific product, but that last post that did so indicated that the desktop version of the app accounted for 80% of the revenue. That version doesn't really have any of the integration feature of the other versions of Balsamiq.
reCAPTCHA's mailhide can generate a URL that the user can visit to obtain your email address. Perhaps you can post that URL in your profile. It's long and ugly though.
What stops Netflix from coming out with a long tail model for self-publishing indie film producers?

Right now, most of their cost is in the DVDs, but already many movies are offered with a streaming option. The next step would be to offer a streaming-only option for long tail content. They would appear to have no barriers to doing this any time now, and a formidable user experience model behind it.
Standard locations are horrible things, imo.

Better would be another <link rel> type. The "contact us" one might even already exist.
I didn't like that I had to download Adobe AIR for downloading and installing your app. What speaks against making a .dmg file and allowing the user to copy your app wherever she/he likes?
Once a service crosses a certain threshold they stop being cool and start reflecting the masses. Look at YouTube now, its MTV + America's funniest home videos (minus Bob Saget).

Facebook mainly beat this by being a very walled garden. Oh-so-open twitter can't do that. And for the record FlockingMe didn't seem any more relevant than the masses just my friend's drivel.
Very good point, but I'm not sure there is a valid solution for this, in part because intent generating sites are often only good at generating intent if they're seen as being impartial. If the blog post you're reading exposes that they'll make a profit if you buy the widget they're talking about, you're much less likely to trust that blog post.

So the intent generation and intent harvesting may need to remain separate. This does raise the question - how can intent generation be rewarded? Well, there are several answers to that. Intent generation is a side-effect of being someone whose opinion is paid attention to (whether for the span of a single blog post, or as a regular source of information and insight). There are many ways to derive profit from being someone people pay attention to regularly, other than direct affiliate marketing of the products you're talking about, so I'm not sure the problem is as critical as this blog post is making it out.

Certainly, as things are, only prolific, popular bloggers can make a living from blogging - but is it really reasonable to expect occasional or occasionally good bloggers to make a living from it? I'm not so sure.

In short, I'm not so sure that this is a problem that needs to be fixed.

For ways to make money from your blog, I'd recommend Steve Pavlina's excellent post on the topic:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-f...