skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our healthcare industry isn't 'wildly dysfunctional'. I knew an illegal immigrant with metastasized cancer, who had multiple surgeries and whose lifetime was extended by at least five years (vs. what he would have gotten in Ukraine with their 'nationalized' healthcare). He polished shoes for a living and had no health insurance. I believe he paid about $20/month for hospital bills in order to avoid bankruptcy (I'm not sure how the loan process works).

I've lived here for thirteen years and haven't heard a single redditesque 'horror' story from anyone I know. If you want/need insurance you can find a way to get it cheaply. If you need medical care, you'll have access to better doctors, better drugs, and better equipment than just about anywhere in the world (not counting EU, as I don't know how your system works in practice). Yeah, our system could use an overhaul, but it is far, far from being 'wildly dysfunctional'.
I would love to know what the heck this guy is talking about, but I have no context. One of my very good friends is working on a startup in this space, and thus I might potentially find this post really sweet.

Secret to blog post writers: please give us context. What are you talking about?
Secret to this post: Who originally said "Atoms are the new bits"?
I don't have health insurance. I'm 26 and healthy. I could probably get insurance that I can afford, but with 4-digit deductibles, co-pays, rescissions and lifetime maximums in the mix, there's absolutely no point as I see it. If I get sick, I'll move everything important into someone else's name and declare bankruptcy... and if someone refuses to treat me because I can't pay, I have a "medical second" (this will be a booming business if we don't fix our healthcare mess) who will be healthy and able take care of the situation. The reason to buy insurance is not to have to worry about something, but insurance doesn't provide that because health insurers only pay out if they feel like it (e.g. if the future stream of premiums exceeds the cost of the claim).

Our grandchildren are going to think of our times as barbaric. People had to buy insurance policies on their own bodies? It will sound to them like 96-hour workweeks for coal miners sound to us.
"I was not a loser, but I just wanted to live ordinarily"
Perhaps this is the best proof of his extraordinary intelligence.
List of fallacies
It's not mine. Mitch Kapor used it at Startup School 2007.

Then Mark Zuckerberg came on an hour later and preached about how you should only hire young people...
Network effects are not the only reason that Microsoft has been successful. Companies have failed to compete with Microsoft for many reasons. Although the technology is often second rate management at Microsoft has been able to broker the right deals, destroy the competition or let the competition destroy themselves.

Microsoft has also benefited from the fragmented market that existed for many years and a clear sales pitch to different levels in the industry from the consumer to the corporation.

The great mistake that many have made is not to appeal to the corporate desktop. This requires Sales people to play golf in my view: not just writing useful software.

This attempt to rattle Google is just another example of these tactics at work.
I'm interviewing the founders of AirBnB live today at 1:30 pm (PT)
This is why Emacs-lovers love Emacs.
Nice one. I entered 3.14, but the results page didn't mention anything about PI. Looks like it just rounds the entered number. Pity! :) But it's still cool!
Terman's Kids (the most famous longitudinal study of IQ and life achievement).

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/arti...
subreddits are excellent.
Your analysis is spot on, and our hypothesis is that if we can deliver a framework that makes online education much better, that there will be a variety of uses for it - everything from paid courses on SEO (in demand hi-tech skills), to free courses on fun things like "MacBeth in an hour" (launching later this week). Our plan right now is to implement an app store like model where educators can create courses for free, but if they want to charge for them, we get a % of the revenue.
My thoughts: "Marketing stunt. How sad."

But then, I don't generally watch or admire "awesome" ads.
Lets just say that nobody reads popular science/physics books for "real" understanding. I always thought of them more as entertainers, giving a glimpse into the mysteries of modern physics, even if superficial or exaggerated, clearer than what probably the situation at the ground is. Not every one can spend enough time to go through the painstaking path of understanding physics up to the level of Quantum Mechanics or General Relativity. If I really wanted to understand what was happening, I would go pick up David Griffiths.
Good Game Mechanics In Your Web App Are Good For Your Users
Making young people get healthcare is what the system needs. Health insurance companies can't make a profit (or break even) if they only insure the sick people.

In all honesty though, I think health insurance companies should all be required to be not-for-profit. That's how Germany and japan's systems work. They have their own problems, but they're vastly better than ours.
Yep. I'd go as far as saying that the fact that Android users, on average, are downloading a similar number of apps as iphone users is hardly interesting at all. The average smartphone user just seems to get around 9 free and one or two paid apps per month. What is important is the number of users that are doing this on a particular platform and maybe any associated trends, if they exist.

The correct headline for this information is "iphone and android users have similar app download behavior". The actual headline implies that Android app download volume would be similar to iphone volume. That would have been a bit of a sensation (to me)... But that's just not what happened.
There's also the fact that many (voters) do have insurance and don't want to pay for someone elses when 'they already got theirs'.

Once someone has their slice of the American dream, they generally fight all cost/tax increases and change.
The movie review idea is very interesting. It sounds like what Netflix is doing.

I hate to be one of those crazy predictors, but I wonder if Google will ever partner with Netflix on that topic. It seems like a good idea.
Transformers 3 Movie Might Become Transformers 3D in 2011
TechCrunch Disrupt, May 24-26 in New York
One of my psychology professors pointed out that income and IQ have a positive, but far from perfect correlation. He said we all could probably think of people who aren't the sharpest who've made great money. He also pointed out that those with high IQs often seek careers they think will be intellectually challenging, but not the most financially rewarding ... like becoming professors.

This also goes to show how much determination matters for a startup. Yes, being bright matters, but being determined matters more.
They kept trying to emulate their desktop success on mobile, build a general purpose operating system and then let any and every hardware manufacturer ship it with their hardware. It worked great on desktop, a thousand IBM clones beat down Apple's proprietary hardware/software combination.

They finally realized the same approach might not work on mobile, the experience is more closely tied to the physical hardware then the desktop or even laptop experience will ever be.

Killing the current Windows Mobile (6.5) is the best move for MS, as was killing PlaysForSure. If you just try to make everyone happy you end up making no-one happy.
"A broken arm can cost $25,000 here with hospitalization"

While you're probably right (and that's scary) that's one helluva broken arm. I broke my arm when I was 13 or so and don't remember spending more than a few hours in the hospital. My arm wasn't crushed or anything but I think 25K might be a stretch.
On my todo list: cutting up the #clojure freenode logs [1], putthing those paragraphs thru Solr and sphinx.

[1] http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/

http://rottyforge.yi.org/irclogs/freenode/%23clojure/

(clojure, #guile, #lisp, #scheme)
I dunno man. When my mom got breast cancer, her health insurance went from $300/mo to $3,000/mo in 30 days! My dad, 10 years her elder came out of retirement at age 70 and went to work for the state of Georgia so that she could get on his insurance plan at work. Thank god my Dad was still alive, and capable of working otherwise she'd be dead.

But the point is: That $300/mo wasn't insurance it was a joke. And that $3000/mo wasn't insurance it was extortion.

If you think our healthcare industry is fine, well, god bless you. I hope you never have to go what my family went through.
I gave you karma for your use of Terminator, and of course, VIM. I find these tools immensely helpful to my development.

With dual 24" Monitors I span terminator across both screens, split horizontal once and vertically on each screen. Modified keybindings make switching between terminals so simple. Add Synergy for seamless access to my Windows system, I can't find a better set up.
You may be in for a rude awakening. I have health insurance for my young, healthy family of 3. (Two 30-somethings and a healthy 4-year-old. No prescriptions, etc.) I pay $700/mo., have a $50 copay for pretty much anything, and no vision or dental. It's consistently gone up 20% a year for the past few years. I keep getting less coverage, they keep raising rates. I keep paying my premium and rarely going to the doctor. The whole system in the U.S. is thoroughly fked.
The difference is that banks provide economic incentives for people to deposit money. What incentive is there for a 20-something to spend $200/month for something they will probably never need?
Your "programmer value quotient" is definitely not IQ. Knowledge and experience acts as IQ multiplier when tackling known class of problems.

I think there is a number of 1.2x programmers that you would prefer to hire instead of single 2.1x programmer. For all activities there's a number like that and it's pretty low.
Anonymous Function Literals And Syntax-Quote Don’t Work Well Together
I went to this. It was awesome.
"But lighter weight tools offer a more rapid edit/test cycle with less waiting time."

If I'm using Visual Studio then a rebuild is a keypress away. I currently have the Resharper addon installed, which means that running all the unit tests just means pressing ctrl-shift-N. I can't see how a lighter weight tool would make that any faster...
on my "todo when i get a sudden infusion of IQ points" list (last time i checked, difficult to impossible in SOLR, sphinx, xapian, tsearch):

- easier search on scala, clojure, JS, erlang line noise:

"_+_", ">:", "::" etc.

- tho with sphinx 0.9.9, thinkikng sphinx, it's easy to do multiple indexes on one rails model, need to revisit..
Ick. Those are some terrible principles.

"Anything given for free should only give a taste, at a clearly limited scale. Not all features should be given out in the free version."

Why? What justification does this have? Especially when network effects come in to play (and if network effects don't come into play, you're getting the modern web startup wrong), the value of adding more free users by making them happy is probably greater than the value of frustrating them with limited features until they buy a paid version.

Having only a percent or two of your users be paid is fine, if all of the free users increase the value of your site enough that it's worth it for the paid users, and the paid users can cover the costs. Being too limiting on free users is more likely to frustrate them and make them leave than make them convert to paid users.

I've seen plenty of services do just fine, in which the free users get all of the same features, and even generous amounts of storage space (or other appropriate limits), with the paid version only being necessary for extremely heavy users.

Anyhow, these principles seem to be plucked out of the air, completely untested, and without even a vague critical analysis (like, maybe punching some numbers into a few different models and seeing what you get). Why should we care?
You can use qualifications in mturk. Maybe this could help?
I hate to break it to you, but by 4th grade, the homework burden is around an hour each night, minimum. My 1st grader is in for 30 minutes each night. And that does not count the 15-45 minutes of reading they might do.

Lots to learn in 4th grade. You can debate the need, or the value, etc., but the fact is she has to pass the state and fed assessments, and that is how the system is setup. Railing against might eventually change it, but my girls are in it right now, so you have to play the game.
Oh SHIT. That game alone makes the case for HTML5 as far as I'm concerned. It may not be the most technically advanced HTML5 game I've seen (or is it?), but it's actually the kind of UI I'd want to use and that's more important than technical sophistication and fancy complex algorithms.
IP history for the lifetime of the gamertag (only one gamertag at a time)

Ouch. Every time you turn your XBox, it's logged.
It was on Wired some weeks ago: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1
I hear a lot of 401k.

Anyone have any experience with it while not being a us citizen?

E.g. Work in the US for some yrs and then leave for good.
Have previous Microsoft phones been upgradeable to more recent versions of the OS?
The Aging Brain Is Less Quick, But More Shrewd
I also went to the first Office Hours session - very useful, great opportunity to meet with other Pittsburgh entrepreneurs (current, former and aspiring AlphaLab members) and the AlphaLab staff. I was able to get some great feedback and even got a new connection to a potential customer as a result!
For SEO Success -- Blogs draw Web Visitors
Mark Suster: The Entrepreneur Thesis
One thing I've noticed is that here reluctance/enthusiasm to study is directly tied to how efficient she feels the studying will be. If she knows she'll get an A because she does effort Y, she will do effort Y. My problem with the school system is that studying is too disconnected from results, and so kids end up feeling like their test results are random. That's a killer.
If you read this article [1] (which is where I think the other sites are getting their quotes) then it sounds like its more than just a couple buttons:

"There could be more to this than just the sin of having two buttons too many, however: Tony Wilkinson, Business Operations Director for Microsoft Australia, told APC that “there are some hardware components that the HD doesn’t have”."

So there are apparently valid hardware reasons to not allow an upgrade.

1. http://apcmag.com/microsoft-no-windows-phone-7-upgrade-for-w...
Interesting page, the rest of the site is good reading too.

I tend to use Wolfram Alpha quite a lot for this: e.g. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.14
Most of it likely goes on administration and bureaucracy.
I could be misinformed, but an hour ago I needed to update someone on some weekly stats who is out of the country. He told me to give him a summary as he can't open an XLS attachment on on his Blackberry (one of the new Bolds). If my iPhone can do that, how on Earth could a 'business' smartphone not do that? Please contradict me if I'm wrong; otherwise Blackberry is in far greater need of 'innovation' than this article argues.
This is off the topic, but putting things in someone else's name before declaring bankruptcy is illegal. If you do so, you'd better hope your creditors don't find out.
It's missing the photo: http://nexuslex.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/1996-sergey-brin...
Hey. They're finally going to use WebKit instead of their extremely sucky browser, that's gotta be a start.
People call it "dysfunctional" because they conflate the "insurance industry" with the "healthcare indsutry". What exists in the American private sector is not, by any means, a healthcare industry. It is merely an insurance industry. By insurance industry standards, it functions well. By healthcare standards, it's terrifically broken.
And when you've developed the strength to do that, how do you increase the resistance (and how do you develop the strength when you can't even do a single pushup like that)?
Incline and Decline Pushups. At the top of a standard pushup you are holding in the mid 60s % of your body weight on your hands. At the bottom in the mid 70s % of your body weight. Changing the angles changes that value. Of course that still doesn't work out your legs but squats and other exercises with out weights do pretty well for most general purpose needs.
The irony is that America spends so so much on military, and seems to believe that military is something extremely important and should be a public service, but doesn't seem to view basic healthcare the same. Bizarre.
I think it's partially that. But it's also partially fear of the unknown. Essentially, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Sure, my health insurance now sucks and I'm terrified they'll drop me, but who knows what would happen if the system changed.
>Major software vendors would never have had a platform to standardize on, so they would have to try and pick a winner and loser.

I wonder whether cross-platform frameworks like Java on the desktop would have enjoyed more uptake were that the case.
Pixar's Use of Harmonic Functions
Fixing Internationalization in ASP.NET
Nine ways to break your systems code using volatile
Review my PECS app: Picto Selector
well that answers a lot of questions for me as a budding entrepreneur. But the one question that I've never found answers to is how you get customers? How do you go out and find people who want to buy what you build?
U.S. Department of Defense Goes Social...Yes, Really
IPad delayed until April?
how can i use html5 video tags with youtube videos? that is, there are youtube videos i want to display using video tags rather than an embedded flash object. is it possible to find the mp4 URI?
O'reilly has released the entire content of a few (really good) books under Open Feedback:

http://labs.oreilly.com/ofps.html

including the scala, haskell, couchdb and mercurial

---------------

http://www.freetechbooks.com/functional-programming-f34.html

-------------

actually, couchdb book isn't mentioned, it's here

http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
As a young company you also don't have to supply health insurance to employees, which can make it easier to convince them to come work for you.
I find that most people who think the US health system is fine are those who've been lucky enough to either never actually use it, or pay for it.
How do People Share Content?
Negative expected dollar value is not the same as negative expected utility. Buying any sort of insurance has the former property (subject to some assumptions that may not actually be true, such as unlimited credit); it need not have the latter.

Suppose, for instance, your total assets are $1M, and that you are extremely healthy but have a 0.1% chance each year of contracting a condition that will kill you rapidly (and agonizingly) unless it is treated, which can be done reliably and safely but costs $2M. (Yes, this is an artificial example.) Then the naive expected cost of your health situation is $2k/year. But if (a) you value your life at a lot more than $1M and (b) raising the money to pay for the treatment would impose a lifetime cost on you that's a lot more than $1M, then in terms of expected utility you would do better to pay for insurance against that condition, even if it costs you (say) $3k/year.
Next time you have some kind of operation, ask for the precise billing code for that, e.g. "49585" is "repair umbilical hernia" IIRC.

Then, look up what the government pays under Medicare/caid for the various pieces of the operation. Compare with what you paid.

In the case of the above operation, I was quoted $7-12K from the various local hospitals that are always running ads about how much they "care". The "cash price" they offer to Amish and Old Order Mennonites is $3500. Price under Medicare/caid was even less than that.

What we NEED is price transparency and the ability to shop around.
Depends on the task. There are some tasks any number of lesser programmers won't be able to complete. There are conceptual levels to programming that come into play on certain tasks. Huge numbers of programmers that don't understand those concepts won't be able to solve the problems.
The dilemma of open development and polish
How abvout this graph: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/healthcare-spending-a...

Just about every other rich country spends less per person on healthcare than the USA (typically about half), and the people live longer. The Japanese, the longest-lived large country in the world, spend about a third per person of what the USA does.

Clearly dysfunctional. "Wildly"? That's a matter for debate.
The Zune replacing a plethora of PlaysForSure devices was itself an example of copying Apple's iPod strategy.

This was the point when they realised their desktop strategy of creating an OS for multiple commodity hardware manufacturers wasn't working in the mobile device space.

Windows Phone 7 Series is just taking the Zune and turning it into a phone. Which again, is copying Apple's iPod -> iPhone strategy and adding the odd compromise of still having multiple commodity manufacturers but constraining them all to producing near identical devices.
A friend of mine once remarked that what consumers really want is health maintenance, not health insurance.

With my car insurance policy, if, say, someone dings my bumper, I can decide whether it’s really worth pursuing a claim through the insurer or whether I should just settle with the other guy for a smaller amount of cash.

Some people in the health insurance industry, thinking along the same lines, seem to believe that if I have a funny feeling in my chest, I should be making a judgement call about whether I should go to the emergency room (and suffer a copay if it turns out to not be an emergency after all) or take some aspirin and see if it gets better by itself. I think this is fundamentally the wrong approach.
Definitely, me too. I just thought it would be a good first test to just enter the first digits of PI. :)
I recently did some work porting Hecl to the BB, and just found it to generally be a painful experience. Windows-only, lots of weird stuff, a slow emulator, and a generally odd platform. The actual phones are very nice, but in an iPhone/Android world, I think that's not an edge any longer.
The arrow key nav reminds me of http://keyboardr.com/. It would be good if you made the page higher density with content on the left and right as well. Good stuff though!
Hollywood disagrees.
What really can happen if someone cuts random wire?
I think worker reaction was bit too nervous.
If in fact cabling is redundant there should be no problem with cutting just one wire.
I would doubt it. Physical coordination seems to be inversely correlated with signs of intellectual achievement, such as advanced degrees etc. People who live in their head seem awkward in their bodies.
It's the wrong approach why? Because you are supposed to decide whether or not to pursue medical treatment? How else could it work? Would you want a system where somebody else made that choice for you? Or one where you always went to the doctor? Both of those options don't sound so good to me.
Just one week alone with Google - A TechEye experiment
Navigate your way through user photos in Google Street View