skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something similar is in place now with medications containing codeine derivatives (such as Percocet). In the US, they invariably contain a high dose of acetaminophen, specifically included to deter abuse. This guarantees that anyone trying to take a large recreational dose of painkillers is risking liver failure.

It looks like the FDA may have finally decided this is a terrible idea: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/30/acetaminophen.fda.heari...
I'm sorry, but that's a douchebag move if you don't warn Andrew ahead of time.
Thank God he’s not alive. He was so proud.

I often hear that, regardless of whether or not I agree with any particular war, the world needs more men willing to "stand up for freedom". I think the world needs less men who are willing to kill just because someone else told them it was for freedom.
From the HN submit page:

Please make title < 80 characters.
“The immediate effect of these audits is to force individual programmers ... to abandon their dreams of getting rich off their high-technology skills,” reported an article in The Times on Section 1706 more than a decade ago. “But the broader impact is that small businesses started by one entrepreneur do not have a chance to grow into mighty enterprises that can create jobs and generate more taxes.”

I agree that this is a terrible law, both in its enactment (special treatment for IBM at our expense) and its results.

However, what's to prevent an individual from selling a product or service, growing that business into a multi-partner/employee business, and then if they want, contracting out? Their contracting focus could be related to their base business, or just raw general talent.
Akrasia means not actually doing what you think you should be doing. For example, actually spending time reading HN when you should be coding.

I think this article would get more traction if a different term was used, or a parenthetical explanation provided. A lot of people are interested in this issue, but most of them probably don't know what "akrasia" is.
This sounds like a reasonable explanation for why filibustering is more common, but I don't know that the old way is better. The willingness of our representatives to stay out on the floor past their bedtime and let their voices get hoarse shouldn't really be a qualification for governing. Why not make a filibuster require doing continuous jumping-jacks, or saying you can only filibuster as long as you don't leave the floor to take a leak? It's just silly.
im going to post something separate together later, but who else is going to be in miami for fowa on tuesday? what about the night before? Im thinking of doing a hackers+founders type meetup/dinner.
This title is so much better than "Op Amps for Dummies" would have been. I may not be an expert in a field, but that doesn't make me stupid.

The book itself looks pretty good, too. :)
The job of a doctor is to treat people who are ill because the job of a doctor is to treat people who are ill?

Welcome to tautology club.
Usually it's the other way around: unpalatable additives are added to already poisonous substances, to prevent them from being consumed. The usual example is cleaning alcohol: it already contains methanol (because it is cheaper than ethanol and because it has different properties, which makes for better cleaning alcohol) and the coloring, smelling and vomit-reflex-inducing substances are added to prevent poor, ignorant slobs from going blind and paralysed (and eventually dead) by drinking it.
Buzz Failed To Appreciate Users Have Differing Privacy Expectations
Don't confuse a "business plan" with a "project plan". A project plan tells you exactly how you (think you) will get from A to B. A business plan is how you explore the problem space. It shows the strengths and weaknesses of your vision, resources, competitors, people, finances etc. You can be successful without thinking through that stuff, but it does help and it does matter.
Open sourcers fortify Ubuntu's Koala food
Not if you had to break even the most trivial content protection schemes to do it.
Is that a serious comment?

I'm typing this on a quad core with 2 21" monitors. My cell phone has more capabilities than my computer did a decade ago. Way more people have computers, smartphones, etc than 10 years ago.

Bodies haven't double transistor counts. More to the point, there are actually fewer people insured as a % of the population than there were a decade ago, and the population has certainly not been growing at 15% a year.

You're probably big on curbing gov't spending.. go walk down to your local town/city hall, get a copy of the budget now and 10 years ago, take a look at the difference in healthcare spending.
I am aware of that.

But that applies to everything out there that relies on mouseover.

When the iPad comes along and people will be using it for more complex webbrowsing a lot of web applications/services will have to be rewritten because they rely on mouseover states.
Farmville players outnumber real farmers in the US by a ratio of 60 to 1
Again that can be applied to everything that uses mouseover as part of it's interaction flow.

Tooltips, Alt Tags, slideshows and so on.
You may want to read the Sequel blog on comparison with ActiveRecord and the new Arel API:

http://sequel.heroku.com/
Fast-food breakfast sales decline as fewer head to work
Just say it in your head with a Mexican accent.
The nerds go on and on about the Stirling engine as a huge lost opportunity for heat engines. Roughly the Stirling engine is a heat engine with an extra heat exchanger (a fairly clever idea)- but by 1884 the steam world was moving on to turbines which themselves approach the thermodynamic ideal. The steam turbine may not be a cute tabletop demonstration- but it pushed a lot of ships across the Atlantic.
The future of public debt: prospects and implications
A doctor's office --- or even a regional medical center --- has different scaling pressures than a call center. Call centers are centralized. They're more strongly incentivized to:

* Ramp up new hires as cheaply as possible

* Keep staff maximally interchangeable and minimally accountable

* Keep their resources as close to oversubscribed as possible

A doctor's office has these same pressures, but on a much smaller scale. It is a big deal for your doctor to hire a new full-time nurse. Patients will interact with staff face-to-face and at length. As busy as the office gets during busy hours, there are prolonged lulls.

Call centers also win several extra problems that a doctor's office doesn't have:

* Terrible continuity across multiple calls

* The need to talk lay people through basic medical testing (ever tried to do tech support for someone who doesn't know how to use a mouse?)

* The personnel management problems of having multiple tiers of support staff.

I don't have any arguments about standardizing medicine. If you reread anything I've written today, I'm in favor of the nurse practitioner model, and I see the problem with relying on full-service medical doctors. I just think call centers are terrible for consumers.
Such a service has been running very effectively in the UK for over a decade, called NHS Direct: http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk
This is a neat paper from NIPS 2006- and here is a PDF you can download without Scribd (which seems to require a password/login to download): http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips06-mapredu...
"U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition"
Even if we made it as easy as possible to get a medical degree, we wouldn't solve the scarcity problem. It's extremely expensive, in time and dollars, to become a doctor; it takes 10-12 years.
The wireless bandwidth crunch
I'm not seeing much of a win here over emacs's py-shell.
After 8 yrs & $400M in VC money, is K.R. Sridhar’s fuel cell ready to launch?
"U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences" (76 chars)

Is still much better than making stuff up. The government did not 'poison lawbreakers without trial'. It makes it sound like they took someone in custody and fed them poison.
I have the same opinion of my mortgage holder, except when I get on the phone with them, whereupon I have exactly the opposite of your experience: long wait times, incompetant first-tier support, a total lack of continuity across multiple calls, and inconsistent answers to questions. Fortunately, all I stand to lose from a major snafu with my mortgage is my house.
Well, I've read all 60 comments on this thread, and I'm not convinced. I think this decision is bullshit. The type of people who need to see these videos don't have the kind of money Andrew is asking for.

What is the ideal story for these videos? That some kid who doesn't know what to do with his life stumbles across them and is inspired to start a startup. Is that going to happen with a $25/month paywall? Of course not.

Andrew - what's the purpose of your site? Is it a social service? Or is it a for-profit business? I do not get the impression you are poor. I cannot imagine how the bandwidth costs of the site exceed $100/month or so (and if they do, talk to me). But if you see it as a for-profit business, I think it will fail. And if it's supposed to be a "giving back" social dividend for your own success - and that's honestly the impression I got - then this nickel-and-diming will shoot it in the head.
Because it's largely not a (near-)required expenditure that bankrupts people.
Well, I don't know about plumbers, but architects know all about working for free to build a portfolio... For example, if an architect wants to do something a bit more challenging than yet another McMansion, they are going to have to enter competitions where only the winner gets paid. They do it anyhow, because placing well in a competition also helps to build your reputation as a designer.
Also, in regards to your original comment, I doubt that PC and cellphone spending has even increased by much compared to inflation, in the last 10 years.

A decade ago for $1k, I'd get a P3, 1GHz, 256MB RAM, no monitor. Now, for the same price, I can get a quad core with 4GB and a flat screen. Unit prices are way down. I don't think increased demand due to cheaper supply takes us to 15% increase a year -- I think you're underestimating just how steep that curve is.
Poor man's CMS: CK Editor + Apache Sling integration in 64 lines of code
"slower" means "choppy" and is not interchangeable with "use more resources" as you suggests. I have never seen any flash content that runs choppy on my 2 GHz Macbook. Post an example and back up your claim.
Original: http://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel
Today, medicine has more capabilities than 10 years ago. There are all sorts of medical technologies today which were available to few/no people 10 years ago. Roughly 10/17 of all non-generic drugs were invented in the past 10 years.

It's more or less the same situation: new technology creates more features, and people are willing to spend more on those features.

So yes, it was a serious comment. You stated a criteria which should trigger reform, namely 15% growth/year.

Are you willing to apply this criteria uniformly, or is it really just a made up post-hoc rationalization for your already existing beliefs?
"Though all this SQL stuff doesn't really matter because the future of web-apps are all going to be driven by non-relational databases such as MongoDB"

On what do you base this? While "NoSQL" storage suits some class of applications, where's the evidence that it suits all applications?
I do not understand what this is about.
I'm typing this on a quad core with 2 21" monitors. My cell phone has more capabilities than my computer did a decade ago. Way more people have computers,

Ummm. That's precisely the point.

Your phone and PC are more complex, with more capability, and more other people are using such devices. The exact same thing is driving increased spending in healthcare. The previous comment stands.

More to the point, there are actually fewer people insured as a % of the population

And yet virtually all of those uninsured people already get medical care. If they have an acute need and go to the emergency room, they will be served.

I don't mean to say that the system is perfect -- indeed, it's badly broken. But misrepresenting the problem doesn't get it fixed. At best, it fixes a problem that doesn't exist because it's targeted at the wrong thing!
Honestly, instead of being a bunch of a-holes and complaining about it. Why not just offer him a suggestion here: http://mixergy.wufoo.com/forms/what-price-do-you-think-is-fa... Tell him what you are willing to pay, if at all. From the feedback he receives, I am sure he is smart enough to pivot based on this feedback.

This is his start up, it is his right to experiment as he desires.
Correct, it was murder from afar.
Not really! see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol). Since normal alcohol (ethanol) is highly taxed (sin tax), additives are added to stop people from using it other than for industrial or medical use or even to make it difficult to distill again, hence they add methanol and the additives. The tax man has protected himself very carefully :)
Can you explain/give pointers as to how the indices can be stored entirely in ram ?
Three subscription options: $25, $50 or $100 per month for exactly the same product. Normally tiered pricing is used with different product variations to target different market segments more effectively. In this case, since the product is fixed and surely nobody would voluntarily pay the higher price, he must be using this as a psychological trick to make the $25 seem more reasonable - an interesting idea.
Tooltips aren't crucial to use a webpage the way mouseover and mousemove events are crucial to most flash games.
Taxes are a required expenditure that bankrupts people [1]. As far as I know, most people pay more money in taxes than they do on medicine/health insurance.

Does that necessitate tax reform?

[1] Many studies purport to count medical bankruptcies. They use criteria like "> $1000 spent on medical costs in year prior to bankruptcy". Using that same criteria, we would probably learn that nearly all bankruptcies are caused by taxes.
Personally, acting against my "better judgment" almost always results from a failure of emotional regulation. The only way I've found to reliably solve this problem has been to develop awareness of the emotional issues underlying ill-considered reactions, and develop the capacity to peacefully experience those emotions without a behavioral reaction. Technical solutions like leechblock and organizational solutions like strict scheduling can temporarily mask the problem, but they don't last, because I experience them as a form of fighting with myself, and when I fight with myself, I always lose.
OK, I'll accept that criticism. It's clear that we have different outlooks, and while I disagree strongly with yours, I understand that there is a legitimate philosophy that leads to it.

Best, then, to take our heads out of the sand and address the divide directly. Otherwise we will have the same conflicts over every issue, arguing over surface details without ever really resolving anything, all the while building more and more acrimony.
If you have the time to do that 5 videos a week x 4 weeks instead of paying $25/month, you're valuing your time too cheaply.
The type of people who need to see these videos don't have the kind of money Andrew is asking for.

I think that's the strange thing about this.

On one hand, Andrew makes out to only have an interest in helping others out. But then he starts charging. It's starting to look like the guy who wants to teach you how to make a million dollars next year -- if you'll only buy his $29.95 book

Of course, it's his site to do with it what he wants. And I don't begrudge a man for wanting to make a few bucks. But this doesn't fit into what he says he's trying to do.

It's almost like he can't help himself -- he wants to tell a story a few years from now about how this venture made X dollars. As if by doing it for free, somehow it undermines his image as a crafty businessperson.

But that's just idle speculation on my part.
I take modafinil and I find it very useful.

Modafinil is an essential tool in the arsenal of any active start-upper. Get it. If you are anything like me you will wonder how you got by without it, and I am not kidding.
Well, I'm glad that we agree the system is broken.

I really think you're underestimating how big 15% a year is over a decade.

Regarding the statement about people without insurance already getting medical care -- you're ignoring the fact they're going to be saddled with a $20k medical bill afterwards. Sure, they can declare bankruptcy, but who wins then? Me, paying my share of the hospital visit that could have been avoided had the person been getting regular checkups?

The system's ridiculously broken. Seriously, go find your local government budgets and look at how much money is being spent on medical care compared to 10 years ago. That's money that could be in your pocket or in your community via more school spending, better road upkeep or whatever. Then apply the same savings to every private US-based product or service you buy, if they're giving their employees health insurance, you're paying for it.

Healthcare investments in technology should be reducing costs. Like in electronics. They're increasing them instead. That's badly broken.
> Personally, acting against my "better judgment" almost always results from a failure of emotional regulation. The only way I've found to reliably solve this problem has been to develop awareness of the emotional issues underlying ill-considered reactions, and develop the capacity to peacefully experience those emotions without a behavioral reaction.

Would you care to elaborate on this? Seems like quite valuable stuff you're doing.
I started with AR for Jotbot (my desktop JRuby app), but it had assorted funkiness that made using outside of a gem environment too annoying, so I gave up. (Gem code should not have 'require "rubygems"' littered about. )

I had been using Sequel with Web apps already, and when I needed to add adapter code for the Java H2 DB it was pretty straightforward, plus Jeremy was quite helpful.

Besides, Sequel always felt more like Ruby than AR.

Big props to Jeremy and team for a sweet library.

(Just wish it had a different name. :) )
http://www.justin.tv/mixergy/all
So it's actually each of the server that sees this traffic :)

And yes, we're nothing (yet!) compared to what the big guys just. However, most of the tim they used their very own software to achieve that; I'm just using out-of-the-box redis, which makes this available to _anyone_.
I'm sure it's just a test.
This one doesn't come with an Emacs 10 year learning curve prerequisite. ;-)
So we would solve the scarcity problem 10-12 years in the future.

Currently, for every person accepted by medical school, there are approximately 2 people with almost identical grades/scores who are rejected. This suggests we could roughly triple the supply of doctors if we put effort into training more.
That linked article does not say acetaminophen is an intentional poison, but that its is an active drug that now appears to have side effects, and they also want to remove it from medicines where it is the primary ingredient.
I think the only way to is add RAM when your indices grow.. that's what we did up until now. There is absolutely now way a data store to keep this kind of performance as soon as you involve a disk, so, yes, the secret of whatever datastore is to _always_ keep everything in memory.
Well, the amount that people spend in taxes has certainly not been going up by 15% a year. Hey, Obama probably cut your taxes more than Bush (unless you're making > 250k or so), so things are going the right direction there. We haven't had a tax increase since Clinton, in fact. Healthcare rates go up every year.

Regarding tax reform: Sure. Our deduction system is crazy, Warren Buffet pays far less as a share of his income than I do. That's not fair, simplify the system and you can lower the rate across the board while collecting the same revenue. I'm consistent with these things :)
Typical. 70,000 killed and people get upset about who was on the plane.

Ah, Bartleby.
Very interesting. What were your challenges with respect to the machine translations specifically? Also, can you post or share the MTurk ads you use/d?
Wow, that's some surprisingly shoddy fact checking. And how do you miss running this past a group of veterans from the unit that dropped the bombs when they're even putting out a regular newsletter?
I get unbelievably bad phone service from:

* The phone company (for instance, my DSL goes down for 2 days because three tiers of tech support can't reset a DSLAM port without doing a truck roll first)

* My bank (for instance, it takes 1.5 hours in a grocery store parking lot to clear a bogus fraud alert on my debit card)

* My mortgage (for instance, it takes 3 30+ minute calls to successfully confirm receipt of a screwed up mortgage paymetn)

* FedEx (for instance, FedEx can't explain the difference between Freight and Standard shipping, doesn't know that they can't schedule a Freight pickup, and delays a shipment for a day)

* Airlines (for instance, it takes 30+ minutes to confirm that no support tier at Air Canada can fix screwed up seat assignments that take 4 minutes for a gate agent to fix afterwards)

* Taxi dispatches (for instance, I book a car a couple hours in advance, call multiple times to confirm, and find out 15 minutes after my deadline that no order was ever taken)

I'm being serious: I can't come up with an example where phone support involved a call center for me where I've had a good --- or even acceptable --- experience. Call centers are uniformly terrible. I'm convinced this is so because call centers have no incentive to be effective. They are pure cost centers, necessary evils for their owners. That's why so many of them get outsourced, further attenuating any accountability for their work.
"If you have the time to do that 5 videos a week x 4 weeks instead of paying $25/month, you're valuing your time too cheaply."

If he is a half way decent programmer he could build a script in half an a hour to automate the whole thing. So the "valuing your time too cheaply" argument doesn't hold at all.
Yeah, the analogy breaks down at the point where a computer program solves someone's concrete problem. The most a musical piece will do is make you feel something. People are always going to pay for solutions to concrete problems, because everybody's problem is slightly different, and needs a slightly different solution.
A little more context would be outstanding.
Yes, if you can find a single example in the economy where something's a basic necessity (or even a commonly owned luxury) and we're dealing with a 15% increase in unit costs per year, then that's something badly broken.

I wouldn't argue for gov't involvement in reform unless it were a basic necessity, luxuries tend to work themselves out through the market, charge too much and people won't buy.

What we're seeing with these price increases isn't people loving health insurance so much they want to buy more of it. It's people being forced to pay more and more for a necessity because if they don't have insurance, a broken arm means bankruptcy or close to it. There's no functioning market.
I think the writer suggests that people end the practice of using features that automatically cross-post to multiple "social" sites. E.g., auto-posting your tweets to facebook and buzz -- and start formatting & filtering posts for each context like: http://unlinkyourfeeds.tumblr.com/post/387796108/theres-a-be...
Haven't they heard of QuickBooks? This really shouldn't be this complicated for them to know where money went.