skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I don't claim to have "some sort of windows" into their minds, and I don't claim to know whatever their motives are. But I do see the pretentiousness behind what he claims it is.

Sure, they are working towards the benefit society. Anyone who has a job can justifiably claim so, unless they are doing something really evil/wrong. How? That is already covered by Friedman and Rodgers. When you work, you contribute to society in a particular way, and you can/should be proud of it.

Let's get back to Whole Foods. What is really the motive behind a business such as Whole Foods when they do something such as donate their 5% profit?
Mackey gives 1 reason himself: "There can be little doubt that a certain amount of corporate philanthropy is simply good business and works for the long-term benefit of the investors."
There, so 1 reason is precisely because it benefits the business, thus it benefits the shareholders. The business gains goodwill, an intangible, not taxable asset capable of generating future profit. Nobody is advocating that you should not love your society and donate a little. What's essentially being argued is your core interest. And to pretend that the investors don't have anything to do with it, well that's really just a cloak to disguise business motives.

If the core interest does not involve the shareholders, what happen if the business falls on hard time? Whole Foods may be doing well, but like I said before, what if it donated more and not getting the publicity/customers it wanted, while the business itself is failing? As a business goes through hard time, it will realize the importance of the shareholders interest, to avoid being out of business, which would serve society no good. Which is pretty much why Rodgers called Mackey's article: "How Business and Profit Making Fit Into My Overarching Philosophy of Altruism." To Mackey, what he thinks he's doing leads to profit. To Rodgers, it is profit that leads to what he did, and I agree.

Mackey also claims that it'd be justifiable even if his donation program did not generate PR/profit. To which I don't agree, on what grounds would it be justifiable when you are using someone else's money for your own interest? And also the part where he claims he "hired" his investors. I think Rodgers already talk about that. He can afford to say this only because Whole Foods is doing well. The donation program happened to serve the business needs but that doesn't mean the opposite.

Perhaps I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself, but Friedman and Rodgers do have very good points in that article that pretty much sums up everything.
This is a tough search, looking for meta-information. Here's best I can find quickly:

The number of pages in the Federal Register more than doubled during [Nixon's] administration, rising from roughly twenty thousand in 1969 to forty-five thousand in 1974, when he resigned, and sixty thousand the next year. The all-time peak, reached in 1980, was eighty-seven thousand. The number of pages declined sharply during the Reagan administration, then rose again under Presidents Bush and Clinton. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Consumer Product Safety Commission; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Endangered Species Act; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Legal Services Corporation; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration-all had their origin during the Nixon administration. In addition, affirmative action and wage and price control were introduced.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3540771.html
"It's extremely expensive, in time and dollars, to become a doctor; it takes 10-12 years."

If there were a large increase in medical schools, wouldn't the competition drive the price down?

It would also help if people could receive a greater range of medical treatment from trained professionals who were not full-blown doctors.
What is he testing? He is not, for example, testing if people would pay $50 because I'd assume 99.99% of people who would pay $50 will instead pay $25 whilst that is an option.
This is something all publishers grapple with so I'm not going to fault Andrew for exploring ways he can make money for his time investment which is substantial. I think the pricing is a bit high ... I'd be more likely to pay $100/year for a subscription but I'm not sure if there's enough value in these interviews to warrant more. There might be but I'll have to think about it.

I also think it's going to prevent new users from discovering the value of the site and returning/becoming fans. Yes, you can watch one or two recent videos for free (currently doesn't work?), but I think people become fans when they can dig into the archive and watch some other interviews. I became a fan after discovering a link to a video somewhere and then spending a few hours digging through the archive. I'm not sure people who are just discovering Mixergy will get out the wallet on the strength of one or two videos, so they'll be less likely to dig deep and find the value of site. I wouldn't have done that, and probably wouldn't have returned except for the occasional link that shows up in a stream somewhere.

It's a tight rope to walk. There are a ton of monetization options he can explore and I don't blame him from trying. Just hope he doesn't put off his audience/guests or lose his momentum while trying to find the right path forward because this is probably the hardest one to sell.
I wasn't suggesting that relaxing restrictions wouldn't help because it would take 10 years to see the effects. I was suggesting that there are other significant obstacles to recruiting people into the medical profession besides accreditation.

Consider also that if you tripled the number of doctors, supply/demand says doctors will make less money, making the prospect of suffering through 10-12 years of training (and N years of low-wage work) less attractive.

Again, medical care should be less lucrative for providers, and I agree that we should make it easier to become doctors. I just think that the long-term scalable solution for this problem has to involve more than just doctors. It only takes 4-6 years to become a nurse practitioner.
I agree, the $25 / month approach definitely seems weird.

I see a lot of reasons for Andrew wanting to charge. People countlessly complain on here about the quality of transcripts. That could be remedied if he had more money coming in. Charging might also support the b/w costs. Not sure how much he has been taking in via the ads in the beginning of his videos.

I have to wonder if there is a better solution for what he is trying to accomplish. To me, part of the problem with making Mixergy throw off cash probably stems from the fact that right now the audience is kind of narrow. It targets scrappy people involved in startups. Advertising probably wont yield much on that end.

Maybe the goal should be to actually expand Mixergy's audience to a wider audience to create more advertising opportunities. I wonder if Andrew has ever considered trying to offer his programming on one of the bigger tech sites. Some kind of deal there could work and he has a good library of content built up.
It is incredibly valuable, but it is also slow and often quite painful.

My approach has been through Buddhist meditation, but any practice which fosters emotional awareness and resilience could help in the same way.

The practices described in the podcasts linked below are a concrete example of what I'm talking about. (But my own meditation practice goes in a different direction.)

http://www.unfetteredmind.com/audio/podretreat.php?code=RER#...
This. I recently had this epiphany and pretty much said the same thing http://blog.everythings-beta.com/?p=332.

Important things:

* start with small things and set a specific completion date/feature spec.

* stop at a point where you know exactly what you need to do next. It's much easier to come back when you do this.

* use org-mode to plan/track your project. I like checking things off. The feeling of meeting mini-goals will keep you going.

Go forth and finish :)
Historically, the kids who'll become really good programmers don't have to be exposed to it before college. They'll already have started programming before they're in high school. If they're really drawn to it, noone will be able to keep them away from it that long.

In my experience it's not a question of exposure, it's a question of the pay being offered. Most programmers that kids know probably don't make very much money. That could be changed if there was more exposure for those who greatly enjoy and profit from the craft.
You set up new events that handle low level stroke information or higher level strokes and chords. Multi-touch in Flash is possible; I was doing it three years ago on custom hardware. In some cases games would certainly need to be altered to work with the new events, but the AS3 event system is robust enough that you can write apps that work on multi-touch and non-multi-touch hardware.
The Stirling Engine has the highest theoretical efficiency compared to other heat engine cycles (it is equivalent to that of the Carnot Cycle). Simply it depends on the temperature difference between the hot and cold side. If you drive it it becomes a refrigeration machine. The problem was and is materials for practical applications. It needs highly efficient and compact heat exchangers and also the porous nature of the re-generator is a problem. Helium is a better gas to use, but being so light at high pressures you get leakages.

I spent more than 5 years of my life (PhD) designing, building and simulating one (with only one moving part) and that got me in a major way into computing:) in the late 80's-90's. I did not touch the field for many years, but lately it has been at the back of my mind, if there are any applications for it in nano-machines.
I would also be interested in checking this out if possible. Did I miss the link? Thanks.
A tour of the open standards used by Google Buzz
Can NHS Direct people write prescriptions over the phone?
available to _anyone_

I get a real kid-in-a-candy-store feel from OSS these days, because it really, really is bringing down barriers for making wonderful things. Facebook solves some of the hardest engineering challenges the software industry has ever known. I sell bingo cards to sixty year-old women. We both use the exact same Memcached. How cool is that? (OK, so they might have about four terabytes more RAM attached to it than I do, give or take, but that's just an implementation detail. :) )
Oh come now. It's at most two years. :-)
How are you so sure he was unaware of, for example, how murderously brutal the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was? Right up to the surrender Imperial Japan was killing six figures worth of people every month.

There are rather a lot of Chinese and Koreans who are alive today because we ended that regime as quickly and decisively as we could. Granted, we did that mostly to save the lives of our own people and so we wouldn't have to do it again, but that doesn't diminish the overall set of benefits.
Ask HN: You're a Internet millionaire. Why aren't you supporting life extension?
This question is directed to all the exited founders who I know haunt this place. I would have thought that, having achieved immense financial success from your tech efforts, why you're not now interested in supporting research to extend your existence?

There are a number of organisations out there doing what I consider to be credible, useful research. SENS Foundation obviously springs to mind. As does Imminst.org. But these institutions are always strapped for funds, desperately seeking new donations even in the 4 or 5 figures. It always struck me that HN readers of means alone could easily meet those needs.

So - why aren't you donating? Is it a credibility issue? Do you doubt the science? Do you doubt the institutions? Do you not see sufficient ROI? I'm genuinely curious. Thanks.
PBS's Digital Nation - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/ also had a segment where they showed how drone pilots operate.

It's surreal how they "drive to work/war" then come home that night. Having said that from the documentary you also get the impression that they do treat it like they are at war.
I started from the post the writer describes as the starting point, but this post might help to give the extra context that commenters are asking for:

http://unlinkyourfeeds.tumblr.com/post/396675784/google-buzz...

The other thing that helps is if you follow the links labelled "More" below the manifesto. I grant that the manifesto jumps in mid-stream (perhaps even mid-stream of someone else's consciousness), but I think the larger points he makes are well-worth considering.
Also, regarding your studies -- medical expenses are sudden, large and usually unplanned for. Taxes get deducted from paychecks throughout the year in most cases, and are very predictable if not.

I'd say sudden, large shocks to cashflow are more likely to cause bankruptcy than known, predictable outflows. And that's without even getting into the whole thing where taxes are guaranteed to be less than 40% or so of your annual income, but medical expenses will always be the same amount no matter how much money you have in the bank.
A Hanson suggestion from that post: bring in practitioners from places with a low-cost standard of care so they can impose those practices on American medicine.

I'm a broken record, but: that's another benefit of nurse practitioners. They aren't equipped to prescribe exotic, unproven, or advanced medications; instead, they're equipped to provide an 80%-solution standard of care and to recognize when to escalate past that. If NP's were the normal first tier of care for most patients, we'd get better resource allocation simply by eliminating an opportunity for carelessly wasteful decisions from overworked doctors.
"Analgesic nephropathy is the direct result of the DEA's deliberate policy of using APAP as a denaturation agent for narcotics, in the same way methanol was used to denature ethanol that wasn't meant to be drunk"

http://yarchive.net/med/anti_inflammatories.html
No, but the Democrats whine about America being "ungovernable" whenever they fail to get their way. See the Carter years.

Checks and balances are always so inconvenient to the party in power, aren't they? I happen to like the limitations of power. Gridlock is good. Government should work slowly.
Healthcare investments in technology should be reducing costs.

And they are.

As far as I can see, this is just another example of class warfare and envy. The fact is that even the poorest are better off medically than any point in the past.

Because we've now got antibiotics, advanced imaging tech, minimally-invasive surgery -- all things available even to the poorest through Medicare or bad-debt writeoffs in the hospital -- more people can get better care than ever before.

But those things came about because at the beginning, the developers were able to make a killing (excuse the pun) when they sold it. It was the willingness of the more affluent to spend so much that brought about the economies of scale that now let us produce so many of the standard treatments for so little (how much does something like basic antibiotics cost now, even for the uninsured?).

Trying to control the costs of those early treatments that are still in the "pay off the investment" phase of their lifecycle is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I wish I could afford the same treatments that the zillionaires get today. But I know that in a not-too-long time those same treatments will become available to my economic means.
It also contains the genesis of why I am yet optimistic about lifestyle and environmental issues; with less stuff, you need less storage space, less housing, and less waste. With less stuff there's less stuff to move around. With more technology even moving that stuff around might simply be nuclear or solar instead of coal.

Having exploded out of the 1950s with the ability to make lots of stuff, and having had the Russian in the article's reaction writ across a society, I think we've actually seen the peak materialistic consumption for an average 1st worlder now. We've only just begun down the curve but I think it can and will get a lot better.

It's really, really important that we not stifle innovation; where we are now is not sustainable, but where we are headed can be. (And it won't even require massive sacrifices; how the modern-day Puritans will bitch!)
You can distribute your code under any license, no matter what, as long as it's not derived from GPL'd code (eg, you didn't copy-paste it and change a few strings).

The FAQ entry deals with derived works (eg, compiled binaries). If your code's license is not GPL-compatible, then any work derived from both your code and GPL'd code cannot be legally distributed -- for example, it is illegal to distribute a binary which is statically linked against BSD-4 and GPL code. The ability to distribute binaries is why GPL compatibility is so important.

This applies to dynamic languages as well. Python or Ruby code can be distributed under any license the author wishes, but works created from a combination of that code and GPL'd code must be covered by the GPL.

For example, say Alice creates a Python library libalice and publishes it under the GPL. Bob writes an application BobApp which uses that library, and publishes it under the X11 license. Charlie uses py2exe to create an easily distributable version of BobApp, which includes a private copy of libalice. The licenses are:

libalice: GPL
BobApp: X11
Charlie's BobApp.exe: (GPL + X11 + Python license) -> GPL

If you'd like, you can think of licenses mathematically: license(foo + bar) = license(foo) + license(bar). If the licenses are compatible, then the strictest license is used for the derived work. If the licenses are not compatible, the derived work cannot be distributed.

US copyright law, fundamentally, is not complicated. The hard part is figuring out what "derived work" means, which depends on local laws and customs, and which you need to be a lawyer to figure out. Luckily, most cases involving software are very clear-cut, so even lay-people can get by with just a copy of the relevant regulation.
Robots and bees to beat the Taliban
Information should always be free to the community and Mixergy should concentrate on monetization with different ways rather than subscription model....
I predicted this move several days ago based on this comment.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130231

I have long suspected that Andrew has been using fake accounts or paying people to put a positive spin on his threads. The above comment was made by a brand new a account and follows a trend of other fishy comments.
There is no special block or lambda type in Ruby, AFAIK there is just proc and method. The difference is simple, a method is a proc that will be evaluated in the context of its object.

I don't know why you're having a problem passing around foo = lambda {|x,y,z| x+y+z }.

I admit that having to explicitly call a proc using .call or .[] is less pretty than the python equivalent, but it's hardly a big problem.

Having used both Python and Ruby extensively I've concluded that both languages are very nice and usable. They both have their warts and shortcomings, but after Python added closures I really haven't had many "darn, I hate [Ruby|Python] because of shortcoming X".

Edit: As noted elsewhere, there IS in fact a difference between Proc.new and lambda/proc, Though I've personally never used Proc.new.
I can only speak for myself: I only think it's weird that the interviews were given when the site was free. If the interviewees are fine with it, and obviously for the coming interviews, I wish him luck. I personally won't subscribe, but then entrepreneurs also aren't entitled to me having to buy their product.

25$ not being much: if you are not Ramen profitable, it is (It's 5 days of food). To put it in perspective: 25$ is the price of my internet flatrate or a book like "Founders At Work". At the moment I don't buy every book I fancy.

Not saying the interviews are not worth 25$ (don't know), but it is not a "sense of entitlement" to simply have other priorities for spending 25$.
Is there anything like this that integrates well with Vim? Or should I get hacking?
Obama is using deficit spending to make my taxes low in the short term. Sooner or later, taxes will have to drastically increase.

http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/Pictures/WP_Obama_defi...

Regarding taxes, you believe that a $1001 unexpected event will drive you into bankruptcy, but a sustained payment of $10,000/year will not? Note that if that $10,000/year were reduced to $8,999, there would be sufficient money available to pay for the unexpected $1001 payment.
Software that interprets technical drawings
Why would they not perceive it as bait and switch? It is bait and switch.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with bait and switch - it's a common marketing tactic - but let's call a cat a cat.
In most US states, methylated alcohols, along with most household cleaners and automotive fluids, are required to contain substances like bitrex to make them so extremely unpalatable that the risk of consumption is negligible. In some countries in Europe, denatured alcohol is required by law to not contain any methanol (thus raising its price) and is denatured only by bitrex, which has no health risks beyond its flavor.
Having spent a lot of time studying op amps at uni (and thus maybe counting as "experienced" in them) can I say: this is a great read.

Op amps are actually reasonably simple but incredibly useful devices in lots of areas. This breaks it down into simple steps - in fact I wish I had had this at the age of 17/18 when I first met the devices :D
PyCon 2010 Videos Now Available
"Interrupt the process or kill it - the history is preserved!"

That's enough to make me try this.
Your account here was made 4 days ago.
Why limit reducing suffering to other sentient beings? Isn't it desirable to reduce the suffering even of things that are not self aware?
Yeah, ipython.el improves upon python-mode. I'd really like to see if it can be enhanced further using DreamPie.
Afternoon Nap refreshes the brain's capacity to learn
a little green light next to the camera comes on when it is active

Is this true when a single still image is captured? It isn't clear from the reporting whether the cameras were used to capture video or still images.
I have to think that the current/next generation of young gamers are going to be well equipped for this kind of job. Games like Modern Warfare 2 already incorporate things like drone strikes, and these kids are becoming experts at multi-tasking while keeping up their in game reflexes.
Why do you believe that increases in health care costs are due to increases in the cost of basic necessities?

How do you know the increase is not due to spending on unnecessary medicine?

In fact, there is compelling evidence that this is the case. Most studies show that a considerable fraction of medical spending is on medicine which provides no health benefit whatsoever. See this comment for a link to some review articles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140658

So indeed, people love medicine so much that they want to buy more of it. They buy all sorts of medicine which doesn't even make them healthier.

Also, trauma care (broken arms, car crashes) is not a major driver of medical costs.
Since you can include a python interpreter in vim, building some sort of REPL should be rather trivial.
For habitual windows users, the utility KatMouse gives you the ability to use the mousewheel over inactive windows and scroll them without bringing them to the foreground. I recommend it.

Also, it can add middle click to push a window down.