skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a government agency.

You're talking about rules for employees. I'm talking about interaction with clients. When the DMV says "no", you're basically hosed.

> Well, I'll tell you one thing, Medicare doesn't spend the 20 million to deny 21 million dollars in claims like I outlined above.

Actually, it does. More to the point, the rules are such that it doesn't have to spend much money to deny and there's almost nothing that you can do about it.

> We should make switching insurance companies easier, but that doesn't get us anywhere if they're all embracing the same bad practices.

Competition results in better customer service in every other industry, why is health insurance different?

> I don't have the option of starting an insurance company out of my garage like you could with a tech startup

Actually, you do. All it takes is some money and a decent risk model, and you can bootstrap by providing services to companies that self-insure, which significantly reduces the money required.

> That's the tradeoff.. as far as which is more effective, we could look at every other industrialized country which gets better outcomes for a fraction of the cost

Not on comparable populations.
Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun
Can you please explain why this is so?
© 2009 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark, and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://ip2nation.com/
Part of the problem is that you have to "Read Like Math" and not "Read Like A Novel." Papers aren't taken seriously unless they sound serious, and people like to read adventure stories. Anything else is just "too hard."

People don't know how to read scientific papers. They don't know how to find the story in the stilted and stultifying prose. They don't know that you can skim bits and return to them later, you can read through to get the sense, then return to see the details.

And it's got scary looking equations.
I would like to get both, but I wouldn't buy any Apple first gen product (iPad) and I would like to wait to see what iPhone 4G adds to the existing iPhone that would make me want to ditch my iPod Touch+simple and cheap Nokia phone combo i've been using these last two years.
Which raises an interesting question. How many people here monitor the link between their router and their cable modem? I certainly don't.
I was looking for a simple system that produces text, HTML, Latex/PDF from some textual format. I found Sphinx on StackOverflow and it's great. It installs in one command (sudo easy_install sphinx). It's got a command-line autogenerator for creating new projects (sphinx-quickstart). It's easy to use, and the default output looks great. For some reason the Makefile produced by the quickstart doesn't include the 'text' target, but it's easy to add. So far, it looks like a great project.
> The biggest problem is that I don't see any of the actual legislation doing anything about actual input costs to the system or increasing competition.

Not to be rude, but where have you looked?

Besides, if that sort of legislation is what is required, how does its absence justify doing something else?
Bentley University
Why did you type this here?
haha, that's awesome. Is there a goal to this project aside from epic-spin-dry? I'd love to see where it's headed.
Sure, you can be associated with a certain colour such that anyone else in your field who was using the same colour might be confused with your organisation, and the law might legitimately protect against the misrepresentation in that case.

IIRC, this is one of those legal issues where finding a case that actually went to court is quite difficult, because the major cases tend to settle instead, but perhaps there has been the occasional definitive ruling.

In any case, though, that is not what Royal Mail's wording used to say. They didn't claim, say, Pantone colour X. They claimed "red".
IE6 Funeral too early? Stats of German Websites
Wish they could borrow ICC V4 colour rendering at the same time. It would be nice to have Firefox looking normal again.
for example the portal of German city Hamburg (hamburg.de) has still 22.45% IE6, 34.69% IE7, 42.86% IE8 and 49.00% IE in relation to the other browsers.
Damn Google http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Hackanonical
Is there any development on KHTML since Apple's forked it to WebKit?
Overall, I think you're right about Chris's point, but I'm not sure about your comparison of how many gems versus how many manpages.

Many gems are libraries rather than binaries/applications, and as such they don't have user-friendly man pages, but they do have documentation in the form of rdoc/yard/what-have-you. On my system, only gem-man and ronn have manpages, but many other gems have documentation via ri - it's just documentation aimed at other programmers rather than end users. For a library, that makes sense to me.

Having said that, it would be nice if Ruby gem authors got into the habit of using ronn and gem-man in the way that Perl CPAN authors use POD.

Also, and this is just nitpicky, but your second command shouldn't need awk, sort or uniq:

gem man --all | tail -n +3 | wc -l
I agree. It doesn't end at the landing page. A site is a funnel of a series of user actions, knowing what the right actions are and incentivizing and guiding users to accomplish them. I like the screenshots!
Being able to just have fun actually playing an instrument has truly been a blast for me the past 20 years.
I believe the original Apple vs. Microsoft patent spat was for 'Look & Feel' as is part of the current 'Apple vs. Nokia' and 'Apple vs. HTC' patent duels. However my point was that Apple definitely builds on the ideas of others, oftentimes pretty blatantly. So no moral high ground there. What the legal system enables and what is 'right' are two different things.
Wow. The word "kanban" in the title caught my attention so I thought I'd take a look. I currently work (for another week anyway) on the finance team for an aerospace manufacturing firm so we are very familiar with kanban and other lean principles. Little did I know lean principles (even Kanban?) are working their way into the software development world!

This is all the more interesting since I've just taken a position as the financial operations manager for a web/finance startup in Atlanta. Good to know that some of the cool lean principles and tools can translate into my new environment! Definitely something to look into...
RIAA labels 'forced' Apple to make iTunes LP: sources
So you are really asking a two separate questions:

Your second question is "should we implement a social engineering scheme to avoid the regressive nature of the sales tax"?

I say "no". We do that in Ontario and it has been such a nightmare because it distorts spending, complicates pst filing, and leads to people splitting up coffee orders at Tim Hortons into multiple bills (because a "meal" is tax as a luxury if it is above 4 dollars, and no, this was never adjusted for inflation and yes the tax applies to the whole $4.01 rather than just the cent) and other stupid things (never buy 3 muffins at Tim Hortons, you get bumped into the non-meal bracket, but buying 6 gets you the bulk discount AND exemption from the pst because your presumably buying 6 muffins to take home to your kids, rather than stuffing your face with a 3 muffin "luxury meal"). It is so stupid Ontario is doing away with it and harmonizing with the federal GST.

As for inheritance, this will just hit the lower class. Only people with enough money for lawyers will set up trust funds or "gift" their children $500k to buy their house for them. Also when you say "inheritance transfers at 99%" I assume you mean the government takes virtually all of it. If I were dying and had $100M I'd move to the Turks and Caicos and die there, where I can give my kids what I want.

As for your first question, which is basically "can we implement a simple VAT style tax (ie, tax both goods and services, but let companies deduct the VAT they paid against the VAT they collected) across everything and not greatly disadvantage the poor?" The answer is a resounding "Yes" except for a couple key conditions. First, give every adult a cheque for $7k a year if they have lived in the country for 10 months or more during that year. Don't ask for their income or anything. Then implement a 25% tax on EVERYTHING. "Ohh, but we want to encourage reading" NO! Don't let social engineering make this complicated. As soon as you bring in exemptions you bring in lobbyists, accountants, lawyers, and programming complications. All of which slow down productivity growth which, ultimately, reduces government revenue.

The second thing you need to do is issue a one time cheque to people that are retired, based on their current savings that are not in some form of non-income tax fund. The reason for this is that if someone has paid income tax their whole life and was planning on using their $200k cash they have in their bank account to live, you can't just increase their cost of living by 30% or they will starve.

That's it. Problem solved. No more tax forms, or telling the government how much you earned, or (besides the one time thing) how much you saved. No worrying about offshore bank accounts, or whether a freelancer should incorporate or not. More math brains in science and tech. More business brains in enterprise. The reason it won't ever happen? Politicians need to be busy bees.
whats a 'cliff'?
I'm gonna wait for the iPad 5G myself
Cambridge/Boston's Deluxe Co-Working Facility
University of Oklahoma

Go Sooners!
Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle
Don't you also need a license to watch live television broadcast via tv or the internet in the uk? Somehow I don't find this license very surprising...
I don't care what engine they use; it's largely irrelevant to me.

I mentioned that Mozilla is known for having NIH syndrome in response to the parent's question as to why they would use their own JS engine instead of V8. jrockway's point about the timing of it is probably correct, but it doesn't change the fact that people have brought up Mozilla's NIH for years.
Cisco's New Router Could Let Everyone In China Make A Video Call At Once
Presumably any modern processor would use some form of pipelining, which I think would take instructions back up into the billions. (The pentium 4, if I recall correctly, had a 20+ stage pipeline)
That's unfair. I was thinking the same thing when I first started reading, but he provides pointers to excellent resources for producing manpages. I've written manpages before, and I hadn't heard of asciidoc or ronn.

It's easy to posture and and use snark to deride someone for saying something you already know. But I think gentle reminders that our systems are discoverable is a good one. I'm currently TAing a Computer Systems course, and that's a key point I want our students to realize.
IBM: Breakthrough Organic Catalyst = More Effective PET Plastic Recycling
Universidad ORT Uruguay (2nd South American university I see listed :) )
All suggestions for a flat tax I've heard includes a deduction in the beginning. That's hardly tweaking, but certainly not completely flat either. I guess flat is meant to mean flat except for the part that's zero.
That reminds me of Disney's Star Guitarist (http://gizmodo.com/5128332/disney-star-guitarist-guitar-hero...), a game using a real guitar, not sure if it ever came out though..
Building Skills in Python (free online book)
I've always found that browser stats matter most for the site they belong to.
A DOM node can have multiple children but only one parent. To go up the tree and check for a hit you simply call (in pseudocode) node.parent.isOK?.parent.isOK? etc. To go down the tree you have to not only choose your search strategy (depth-first, breadth-first) but also check a whole lot more nodes in the hope that you’ll find what you want.
Shame the Android app is Android 2.0+ only, which means I'm unable to try it with my Hero, at least for the moment.
I bet it is - more than just fun, I imagine, but enriching. Not everyone chooses to enrich themselves in that way. I have chosen others. But it's still fun to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band with a bunch of friends, despite having no musical talent or practice.
Stories like this makes me appreciate open source. Combine the best components for everyone's benefit.
Brit who spent year working as a literary reviser for the government of NKorea
That's a good point, however, might be solved by making the charger introduce itself as one of the well-known USB device classes.
Anyone who has done well for themselves will leave. Those businesses that start to go well will leave.

By this logic, why doesn't every successful Bay Area startup just up and move to Dubai?

If a few rich assholes want to live in Dubai, fine by me, but the successful companies are always going to be where the skilled people are. Skilled people are where the infrastructure (education, health) is best, and you have to pay for infrastructure; that's why taxes exist.

Finally you can afford some nice things, then suddenly you're taxed at 95%.

Define "nice things". For me, "nice things" are good books, cool technologies, travel, challenging problems to solve, and interesting company. None of these have to involve luxury goods. My point is that we'd be taxing people based on what they buy, not their income. In other words, the tax is based on what you do with the money, not how much of it you make. If someone gets rich but is using his money reasonably, he pays reasonable taxes. If he wants to belch tons of CO2 into the air by flying around in his custom-built jet with a swimming pool in it, like a lot of the uncultured mouth-breathers in that set, he'll be very highly taxed for it.

Besides, those among the rich who are ascending Society and flying around in private jets are too busy schmoozing and colluding to be building anything useful, just as authors who get sucked up into that high-society shitfest stop writing readable work. (Hard to write anything valuable if you're constantly coked up.) At this point, they effectively ought to retire. If we discourage them from being here, great! They're already past peak, and now they're just taking up space at the top. Their exodus makes room for people with talent and energy.
I find the 80 character limit very annoying. Here's what the title should have been:

A Year in Pyongyang: The fascinating account of a British guy who spent a year in North Korea working as a literary reviser for their totalitarian government
JSON DB vs ODBMS
No you didn't tick me off and I will write a much longer response later.

Disclaimer: We use this stuff. We are taught this stuff.
Except that pipelining, multiple cores, and hyperthreading then bring it back up. So, let's not get overly pedantic here.
We know that Twitter makes money off the search deals with Google and Bing, and it's a lot more than $5 million.
Venture Region Survey Results: Comparing The Valley, Boston & New York
This is pretty cool idea, and the "SoundKeys in Action" slideshow was definitely helpful.

It seems like the ubiquitous use-cases you're aiming for will rely heavily on the trademark as well. Have you successfully trademarked "SoundKey" for the many uses you've illustrated? I'm just curious, because it seems like a very obvious description of what it is (like trying to trademark "WebDesign" for a web design company). If so, then that's amazing and I think this has the potential to really take off.

On a lighter note, the pronunciation of "Waves crashing on the beach" is hilarious: http://soundkey.com/browse-sounds/58-waves
yes it always depends on the target group, ie. if the website is for developers or "normal customers"
The Long, Strange Journey of Einstein's Brain
Unfortunately, this clause would appear to have legal backing. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 states that a person is guilty of an offence if:-

(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

The relevant wording is "causes a computer to perform any function". This is deliberately broad in order to cover botnets and the like, but would also amply cover deep linking. There is no requirement for the access to be from a computer you control, nor that you personally initiate the access; only that you caused a computer to perform an action with the intent of accessing data without authorisation.

Although unlikely, it is possible that any British website could be prosecuted for ignoring such a T&Cs clause. Prosecutions have been made under the Computer Misuse Act for very vague 'offences'.

I hope it isn't petty, but I'd just like to point out that our quaint little island does have it's own laws; I find it rather discourteous that some posters in this thread seem to have assumed that the whole of the internet is subject solely to the jurisdiction of the United States.
So wait a minute... you're telling me that:

1) Ships are built to withstand normal waves, and have a high likelihood of sinking if hit by a rogue wave.

2) Rogue waves are a regular feature of the ocean, frequent enough that a number of ships every year will be hit by rogue waves.

3) These rogue waves can effectively occur anywhere in the ocean.

4) Despite this, commercial liners, cruise ships, tankers, etc, continue to go out to sea, taking sometimes hundreds of people with them.

Is this basically saying that this common mode of transportation is inherently unsafe and to be avoided? It's one thing to say that "shit happens, and if something goes wrong with the plane, you're fucked", and another altogether to say "we know that this will happen, for sure, one out of X times, no matter how well we may prepare, and it will most likely sink the ship". X may be rather large, but the point is it could be prepared against, but it's not.
As the article says it's like being at (but not "working at") a big company. The co-working space has an open table format that I like, but I also carry my office (laptop/papers/mouse/headphones) in a laptop bag. The community is a nice mix of people, slightly biased around 30-ish and self employed.

If you are in the area, you should at least check it out. You need to make an appointment, but the sales pitch was minimal. Those who end up here didn't need much of a pitch.
oh come on. first i wasn't deriding the original post - if i was "deriding" anything, it was whoever decided it was worth posting here (and those that upvoted it). second, if a rather gentle observation like that is enough to get you offended, you're too sensitive. or you get your rocks off "defending" people that don't need it, or whatever...
Symantec did an analysis on the Trojan: http://www.symantec.com/connect/fr/blogs/trojan-found-usb-ba...
Sorry about that, just made it up on the fly. Hacker(-speak) + canonical (form) portmanteau.
I think gfodor means that this:

I know this might sound goofy, but BDD really does work.

Didnt really get explained - why does it work?

(I have to confess one of my teams tried BDD for a while and it didnt really work out too well. Too much time making or meeting specs :))
I may be mistaken but no where in this article does it say that Noah Everett makes $5million a year. It does say "revenue projections: $3-4 million" and "#1 – have a company worth 8 figures by 24, #2 – have a company generating 7 figures/year in revenue by 25"
"PowerPoint is evil" author to monitor stimulus spending
Also reported here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174714

Many, many comments there.
Management at my gig decided to just use both, a ScrumBan if you will. I think the general manager just wanted a board to stop and look at every time he had to go to the bathroom.
I should probably point out that I'm also a code monkey on an active startup and have written several programs over the years, some of which are in production serving millions of folks. So I use the stuff too. (The reason for the disclaimer is that saying I teach it should probably set off your alarm bells!)
Top 50 Venture-Backed Firms
Custom events in JavaScript
NIT Silchar
My favorite approach to reading science papers of all types is to assume the paper to be bogus, and then read it in order to find out why. If I am doing battle with the author every sentence of the way, I am forced into reading carefully and skeptically. If the author still has me convinced at the end, good on them.

I will say this approach is easier when you have had someone you trust teach you how to read scientific papers. In undergrad and in med school, professors would present us with two similar papers both published in top journals and ask, "Which one is wrong?" It was a highly valuable training exercise for me. The gist of the message that I got was this: (1) If you really need to understand the paper, ignore the discussion (and, sometimes, the results) until you have mastery of the methods and figures. (2) If you are really lost, read the discussion to see what the author thinks she is showing, then go back to the results to see if you agree.
Just the fact that it's a PDF is enough to make me think twice before clicking, never mind reading it.

There was a cool sounding project called AcaWiki (http://acawiki.org) that wanted to crowdsource summaries of research papers. Doesn't look like it's exploded yet (not a single Climate related paper as far as I can see) but it's still a good idea.
Link has mandatory video ad. That's a deal-breaker.
I accidentally submitted the feedproxy redirect link, can someone fix this for me? Thanks.
the two JS engines don't do the same thing.

Mozilla will continue to use the tracing engine to JIT loops. It will fallback to the webkit js engine when the tracing JIT can't be used.
Yes, you can create websites and link to them, but it's cumbersome.

With stickybits, you can just upload and you're done. And people see your resume immediately when scanned.

Also, the first person to scan a barcode is the "moderator" and can delete any content that gets posted.
Microsoft's iPad (2000)
Well, it doesn't happen in real life, but an Intel i7 is capable of issuing 4 instructions per clock cycle (sometimes 5, with a little microcode cheating). A 3.2 GHz quad-core could issue 51.2 billion instructions per second.
Minimal group paradigm
Indeed (though technically you do of course get aural feedback, though if you're a beginning musician you might not be able to interpret it.)

I'm not sure what the interface will look like, but imagine the possibilities of displaying tablature along with musical notation along with what notes you're actually hitting, perhaps even with a photo of the desired hand position for a chord, all simultaneously (or easily accessible).

Then, add training modes, (like guitar hero but with a full metronome range), technique exercises for scales/arpeggios, etc... and you have a powerful training system.
A link is text, a link does not cause any computer to perform any action, a link does not even "connect" to any computer. It's static data.

With proper software "activating" e.g. clicking on a link to uk mail's website may or may not cause one of their computers to perform some function.

If anything you'd need a license to click links, not make them. Unless there's even crazier "contributory computer performance" language in that Legislative Misuse Act of 1990
To ensure the same type of experience across browsers, we decided to make much of the top images. Most people still use IE, and we didn't want gross rendered text.

Also, I like tables :) They just work.