skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly: the incentives are wrong for everyone under an insurance model. Healthier people have an incentive to leave the risk pool and/or only keep catastrophic coverage, increasing premiums for everyone less fortunate. Insurance companies have no incentive to insure anyone who seems like a high risk, i.e. due to a pre-existing or likely-to-emerge condition. Consumers have no incentive to manage their own care expenses or make decisions for themselves, because if they have insurance they're not really paying the full costs. Insurance companies have incentives to deny care whenever possible. Hospitals and doctors have an incentive to charge uninsured people more than insurance companies so that the insurance companies can provide a value-add and because they have to make up for all the care provided to un-/underinsured people who can't pay their bills.

If you believe that a wealthy society like ours has a moral imperative to take care of its poor and sick and elderly, then the insurance model is hopelessly broken. It doesn't mean there's some perfect model out there that has perfectly aligned incentives and no moral hazard, just that this one is probably one of the worse ways to organize things.

If you don't believe that there's any such moral imperative, then that's an entirely different debate.
I can see this model work for AI problems that depend more on data / trained models than actual code or algorithm itself. It also makes sense for patented algorithms (SIFT maybe), paying per instance solved might be cheaper/easier than dealing with licensing issues.

Author is under impression that implementing algorithms is hard. Real problem is analysing and understanding the problem, implementation of the standard algorithms is the easiest part. If your problem is common enough to have its implementation as service, it's very likely there is free library anyway.

Seriously, ask Dijkstra's shortest path at IOI (high school informatics olympiad), I'd bet half of students would get it 100% correct under an hour.
> To these TV executives it makes sense to block Boxee from supporting Hulu because Boxee is for “TVs” and Hulu is only intended for “computers”. Now they’re stuck trying to figure out which arbitrary slot the iPad fits into.

My guess is Hulu web will be slaughtered and only a few (the latest?) episodes will be available.
Apparently people like to reinvent the wheel.
Okay, this argument makes much more sense now; your issue isn't with the actual rates but with the variance between the lowest rates and the highest where age is concerned.

I don't have the time to generate the full model, but generally speaking the Senate version of the bill isn't that far off from where variance is in most states today - if you compare the costs between a 20 year old and a 50 year old, you're going to see the 50 year old pays around 3 times what a 20 year old pays. A 64 year old will pay between 5 and 6 times more (these examples are using data from a state with very lax insurance regulation by the way; in states like California and Massachusetts, the variance will be lower).

Insurance rates are determined by guessing at the risk of any given pool of people and the estimating costs that may be incurred given the riskiness of the pool. By forcing healthy people to buy insurance, the pool of insured people should become less risky; hopefully drawing costs down. I've got no idea as to whether or not that might happen, but assuming the actuaries continue to derive rates the way that they always have; it should lower costs on the whole.
My point is this exactly: It does sound the same.

That is to say, from the outside, the the back-and-forth, the actions and reactions, the allegations of blacklisting, etc., between these scientific communities and their external critics are identical.

In other words, whether you find one instance of excluding a viewpoint from science to be egregious or justified depends entirely on whether you believe the view is full of crap or not.
(0 unread) Yahoo Mail, stamperroger
Chairman of Smartsheet.com: Joining Google in Feasting on Microsoft's Fat
Remember, this isn't the only backend. Native code generation continues on some architectures. LLVM just has its own benefits.
Some would argue that X is an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug ridden, slow implementation of half a window system. The specifications are pretty clear, even if some are honoured more in the breach than in the observance, but otherwise they'd be right. ("This is not a bug; this is a design decision.")
Should fat people on airplanes be treated like tall people?
"Derrek" wanted you to read the newsletter. Because you didn't want to, you now have the chance to "Punish" him. Clicking on the "punish" button leads to a video of Derrek receiving a hot coffee to the face and sinking off the chair.

After your punishment, they asked you if you wanted to make up for being mean by resubscribing.

Inventive, if cruel.
Start a startup? You have the education and you have the tools.
No, you got it backwards. It wasn't those challenging the consensus redefining "peer review", it was the scientific consensus in this case. Consensus was manufactured. You cite examples in the opposite direction.

(One can argue about what the real breakdown of opinions on global warming are with the real scientists, but it's objective truth that it is not 100% agreement within the science, or even close to that.)
so are there any analytical type modules to track this?
FSU layoffs of tenured faculty
They're filtering out the salt: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/inside-hps-green-north-se...
Improving Scholarship (and Rankings) by Buying Out Nonproductive Senior Faculty
I hate to say this, but it hasn't hit the web. It is the web.

You're correct, It is an invasion of privacy. It is awful. But, I think it's better that this information be openly discussed by the tech community rather than hiding our heads in the sand.
I'd call it more of an enthusiasm gap than astroturfing.

Most of us understand that the temperature is in fact rising, ice is in fact melting in record quantities most summers, and ocean acidification is indeed happening. We also know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Those are all facts. If you think they aren't, re-check your facts.

What's up for debate is how much CO2 is affecting the rising temperature. The so-called "skeptics" don't seem to be honing in on this, they're attempting broad brush methods to tar the facts and the uncertainties alike.

So most of us don't bother to engage with those idiots. And you get what looks like astroturfing when in fact it's just a case of being louder.
The article says that if you're incorporated, and the only person hired, it changes nothing.
VIRxSYS is convinced that the HIV vaccine it is planning would be safe because, as in their SIV vaccine, all the genes that would usually make it infectious and able to multiply itself would be removed. "It can't replicate," says Lemiale.

Reminds me of:
But, to answer your question, the reason we know all the animals are female is that we literally make them that way ... and believe me, they can't breed
Sounds like innovation to join a market, rather than innovation to create a market. Why not just patent an improvement on an existing product?

That's one good thing about open source software. Improvements can just be tacked on. You don't have to go invent something totally new. That is one thing that separates software and machines.

It's hard to tack a more efficient engine onto a 5 year old tractor.
Android 2.1 based T-mobile Pulse mini introduced [video]
Where did all the bankers from collapsed institutions go?
They do not. Anyone is free to create a sole proprietorship/partnership/corporation provided that there is not national security implications ("Pam and Tom's Atomic Weapons" - Disallowed "Pam and Tom's Fighter Craft Displays" - Allowed) or confusion in the marketplace or depletion of nation resource (fishing companies, dairy companies, logging, etc). Actually, small business law in Canada is extremely well thought out. There is rarely a tax reason to incorporate, unlike other companies. For example, incorporating and paying out dividends will run you just as much tax as running as a sole proprietor. Usually. There are tricks you can pull, Turks and Caicos QA companies that reduce your profit to nearly 0 but reinvest the profits overseas. Plus IRAP funding is intense if you are large enough to float a couple salaries and you can handle mountains of paperwork.
Some clients, usually larger ones, can be risk adverse to working directly with an independent contractor. Its not hard for an independent contractor to be "independent" per these tax rules. However, many clients don't want to take the risk that the contractor is doing their end right. Whether this is real or perceived risk on the part of the client is not clear to me.

The bottom line is if you are an independent contractor, you should do all your work through an LLC or S/C-Corp and manage your tax filings well. Some clients may still not accept dealing with your LLC directly and hand you a list of "approved contractors" to bill through. The only way you may get in trouble past this is if all you work is for one client and the IRS feels your really acting as an employee.
Hashtags and Twitter
At the very least it doesn't seem to have loosened the terms of the GPL - if the virality clause had been deemed invalid, Katzer would presumably have been able to use the code for his purposes. The GPL does however contain a defensive clause that effectively reverts to "all rights reserved" if the license is not accepted, so who knows.
"It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty." - Boldrin and Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

I highly recommend that everyone should read this book, if only to elevate the average level of sophistication in HN debates about intellectual property.
Who decided the order in which the browser selection is placed, and who decides what browsers are available for download?

We can't ignore the 'explorer' brand is strong in the non-tech savvy. Many have never heard of any browser other than IE, and they recognize the logo. This might not be as detrimental to IE as many people think.

Those who care about what browser they use have already switched. Those who don't will go with either the recognized brand (IE in this case) or the first option. And of course with the Google name next to Chrome, I suspect they will get a large portion of the downloads.

Does the download include the setting of the default search engine? or is that set somewhere else?
Any advice on how to decide which to apply to, aside from relocation issues? Some are more targeted (i.e. Startl), but do people apply to as many as are viable for them?
I've done some limited evaluation of TS. Basically it's easy to configure like Squid/Varnish/etc, but what makes it stand out is that it has a really extensive and flexible plugin api. You can dig into the docs on it here:

http://incubator.apache.org/trafficserver/docs/sdk/
For those who didn't read all the way down, this law was passed in order to pass a tax cut on overseas operations that IBM was lobbying for. PAYGO rules and all that.

Your congress at work -- raise taxes on the little guy in order to give tax breaks to the wealthiest.
> The claim, then, is that the skeptics are not doing science. That is easily refutable

Phil Jones doesn't think it's so easily refutable, does he? It's the only non-conspiracy-theory explanation of the tone of the email leaks, and makes a ton of sense.

[[ Sidebar:

Personally I'm not so sure sceptics are "doing science" either. They don't seem to do much hypotheses forming, nor experimentation, nor evidence gathering... They are only pointing out potential flaws in the work of those who are actually doing the full spectrum of activity. Absolutely: There is real scientific value in that.

However, when you couple it with the fact that the vast majority of their efforts are aimed at the court of public opinion and not a scientific dialogue with other scientists, it starts to smell fishy to me.

]]

All of that aside: your entire point above was that you find the sceptics plausible -- that's fine, but realize that my point in posting the 'thought experiment' is that your interpretation of mainstream climate science as a horrible scandal rests entirely on your judgement of McIntyre etc as legitimate in the first place.
You're moving from asking what the difference is to saying that from the outside there is no appreciable difference. That's a different point entirely.

I believe I've explained what the difference is. Now you can explain it to the next person that asks, right?

Look at it this way: everything that science knows about the world could be full of crap. We really don't know. It's all based on empirical evidence, reproducibility, and induction. Each of these has its problems. Induction is a great tool, but it has known limitations. On Thanksgiving Day, the farm turkey may believe he's going to be fine because every other day in his life nobody has cut his head off. But he's in for rude awakening on this particular day.

That doesn't mean that it's all pointless or useless -- if that's all you've gotten you've missed it entirely -- it just means that deep skepticism about consensus and detachment from politics are the qualities that are absolutely required of science and scientists. Especially climate scientists in such a strong political area. So without knowing anything at all about the underlying science -- whether the world is on a course to oblivion or nothing unusual is going to happen any time soon -- we can observe the scientific discussion and reach certain conclusions about the process. And quite frankly, in this case the process doesn't look so good. That's a useful piece of data no matter who says what about whom or anything else, right?
The "Hacker Diet" is equivocating on the value of "in." What matters is not calories ingested, it's bioavailable calories ingested; see Gary Taubes' _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for details.
As what we do is effectively a limited case of this (recommendations as a service), I'll give my two cents:

This will cause a total nerdgasm, and nobody will buy it.

There is an inverse correlation for how much abstraction is between our product and our customers' bottom-lines and how quickly they're willing to open their wallets. The proposed notion here is taking a couple steps further away from providing an end-to-end solution to a problem. Geeks love that kind of stuff. It's hard to get people to pay for it.
I suspect those plans don't exist because the premiums would have to be so high to make it profitable that it would make more sense financially for most self-employed couples to have one spouse get a job with a group plan that has to cover you even if you decide to have kids.
That is apparently due to a HN bug which strips single quotes from links. The WP article has an apostrophe in the title; the HN-modified link loses the apostrophe, and is broken.
Not to discourage you, but I just switched to QuickBooks Online from a custom accounting system some folks had built for me (for themselves, really, as they were doing all our accounting/sales), and I have to say QBO is outstanding.

In particular, their human support has exceeded all my expectations by an order of magnitude.

So you might keep that in mind as a competitive issue.

Godspeed in your venture, in any case.
We have our common ground in that the current system is broken. My example of a single algorithm was based on the premise that for any algorithm, others can(are) incorporated into it (the algorithm can become synonymous with a cog, which would itself be patentable as well). Therefore, by my viewpoint, the macro level is identical to the micro level. The level of detail in patent applications for physical devices are mindnumbing. A key method of overcoming this problem is by using references to other patents. In this way, you could hold patents X, Y and Z and apply for a third patent A that combined the patents into a macro system without having to detail X, Y and Z all over again. My opinions on how to fix it are based on a blank slate system, all software patents should be of this level of detail, etc. rather than a just "going forward they should be". With that level of detail in a patent, resolving unintentional infringement is trivial while still providing the same output by simply referring to the patent and adjusting your implementation accordingly. This also means that prior art is easier to assess. The difficult part would be obviousness, but given the proper staff and training can be dealt with.

EDIT: Reading your recent response to another commenter below, I don't want to give off the impression that I think any current software patents should be maintained. I think they should be all completely removed (or required to be resubmitted fitting new requirements that include specific details on implementation). My ideas are in the "dream world" where the rigor was applied since the first software patent was applied for.
How the 'climategate' scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics' lies
A local client collects summary statistics to send to The Algorithm over the net, kind of like how google's mobile voice search works.
On the tax side, there is W2 or 1099. When you get W2(salary), taxes are usually withheld. In case of 1099 no taxes are withheld. So, you(as the contractor or LLC owner or Corp owner) have to estimate taxes every quarter.

LLC and Single person corps were treated badly 10yrs ago. Now pretty much every state recognizes LLCs/S-Corps and yes, one can be owner and single employee.
Not only my commute but once I'm at work you can say the same things for most of what I do on my computer. Personally I think there is so much potential for this idea of getting rid of the general purpose workstation/computer. Instead why not use statistics that watch what I do with my computer then "grow" an os/environment that only does those things using the bare minimum UI?

Then once I need to step outside of my normal routine I have to dynamically load modules that get my system close to a stock windows or ubuntu system.
Is this going to have any impact on IE6 share? Or would anyone who gets this ballot have already been auto-updated to IE7 or 8?
Funny - he's saying this in regard to copyrighted data, but it may also be interpreted to be talking about private user data.
Apple's problem with Flash is mobile applications competition
WTFJS
I guess my point was really that because the demographics are so bad, we're going to have to downgrade our expectations for quality and length of care for the elderly, and nobody wants to think about that.
Wow.. just wow. what a load of crap, I cannot even imagine how many people are working "illegally". Most every programmer I know does some work on the side as a 1 person operation.
Honestly? Make a sequel with more features/games ASAP and drop the price of the first to $1.99. You'll have your very own cash cow.

Assuming of course that it didn't take you a year to create the first.
Have things changed? I had no trouble working as a 1099 for a while, nor did any friends. HN and reddit are filled with posts by people claiming to be independent contractors.

How is that one guy with plane is affected by this law, but nobody I've ever talked to is?
This is, in many ways, very similar to what's happening with the CBC here in Canada. CTV outbid the CBC for broadcast rights, and their contract is so strict that the CBC can't even use the Olympic footage for news segments until at least 24 hours has passed. It's complete and total nonsense, because in nearly any other context, fair-use provisions would apply. Somehow, because it's the Olympics, all rationality goes completely away.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134939
Modern United States clothing is a thin man's, or woman's, game, but this hasn't always been the case; it doesn't have to be the case that the fat are unfashionable. European clothing as late as the 18th century, and especially in the 15th-16th centuries, was designed for a heavier average weight than the current one (and this is without beginning to discuss, for example, traditional Chinese clothing).

I don't know if I'm really crazy enough to recommend that you try dressing like Henry VIII or Benjamin Franklin; but keep in mind that it's hypothetically possible, at least.

(Then again, how much _could_ anyone do to you if you went out to dinner or got on a subway dressed in the best fashions of 250 years ago (other than the Scots Highland style of dress which requires a dagger tucked into the left stocking)? I could see certain sorts of people recommending it as a character- or determination-building exercise...)

More seriously, though, I agree with the idea that Winston Churchill -- or G.K. Chesterton, legendarily overweight but positively dapper -- might be a good starting point.
Tax Law Was Cited in Software Engineer’s Suicide Note
''This is Catch-22,'' he said. ''If you are not legitimate because you start out as a one-person corporation and you haven't been in business for a year, then how do you ever start your business? It is nonsensical.''

Save up at least a year's living expenses, get rid of everything you own, travel the world for a year. You'll save money over keeping it, see the world, write some code on your laptop at hotels. Get one of those netbooks that will fit in a backpack. Charge it up at the coffee shop. You can get good wireless cheap overseas. Room and board is cheap.

Make arrangements to work with companies while you are away. Start getting paid the next tax year.

''Basically the I.R.S. is saying it would rather collect less revenue with less cheating than collect more revenue with more cheating. Does that make economic sense?''

It is interesting that what is proposed here as more profitable government policy encourages cheating, something we don't appreciate in our species.
Try to dig into the content part: who are the mentors, lecturers, what activities take part. Forget comparing the money, it is mostly for living costs. Think who can take you to next level in 1-3 months time, what help you need.
Another counter argument: When you target earlier in the funnel, you're less sure of winning that user.

Example: you buy a banner ad promoting a digital camera. The user sees it, and decides it's time to buy one. Now he does research, and ends up buying a competitor. While you were successful in creating demand, you ended up sending a customer to a competitor.

That is why display ads are worth less - you aren't guaranteed to extract the value they create.
A Monstrous Vision For Media Reform
The issue is that by making your long URLs short, they also obscure them, making it harder for you to determine whether it is a good idea to visit.

In my ideal world, the URL shortener would not block you from visiting the site, but would display an interstitial page warning you of the possible problems if you did - much like Google Safe Browsing.
Have a feature like "buy one get one free", so someone can buy a copy for himself and gift a copy to a friend. Its better than lowering the price.
Thanks for the link. Obviously, I don't follow the news that much.
Not just the article, but the senate directly referenced such no-nos:

"For example, an engineer retained by a technical services firm to provide services to a manufacturer cannot avoid the effect of this provision by organizing a corporation that he or she controls and then claiming to provide services as an employee of that corporation."

http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml