skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The health care bill would seem to increase demand for healthcare services without actually increasing supply for healthcare.

Doctors takes years to train, drug trial are still expensive, amongst other thing.

All what we're doing is adding million of individuals into the healthcare system without balancing the supply side equation.

It would also seem to treat health care insurance as a sugar daddy of healthcare, instead of being treated as a mechanism that reduce risks through incentive and such. This make insurance companies big juicy targets for healthcare providers. If people were to spend their money on the daily cost of healthcare, they would be more conscious of the cost, thus use it only as neccesary. Insurances would only be used in high cost emergency measures such as cancer and other diseases, which are preventable and can be reduced by individuals.

This reduce the demand for healthcare and give people incentives to lower their cost their healthcare cost through insurance's discounts, thus less strain on the supply of healthcare.

The taxation scheme also rob people incentive of saving for emergency measures, an alternative or complement to insurance spending, which may have the side effect of impacting long run productive growth or simply maintenance of current productive capacity(Capitals need to be maintained or replaced), as saving are in effect fund the production of capitals, which eventually lead to consumer goods and services.
Benefits of Breast Firming Exercise
It's far better for Americans, but it's far worse for countless individuals around the world.

Look, my life is not better because thousands of innocent people are dying in Iraq. I suffer. My mind is full of regret that my life is what it is due to torture, murder, and the theft and destruction of other people's property.

It's wrong and our society should hold our collective heads in shame.

I am not saying what china is doing is right. I am saying it is wrong for us to go into their country, profit off of their citizens and break their laws. If you want to take their money, obey the law.

This is why I am anti-google. They are the example that proves we are a lawless nation. Google has been allowed to break the law repeatedly and continue to profit. If any individual around here broke the laws that google breaks every day -- making millions of dollars for doing it -- we'd be fined or in prison.
Thank you. I agree 100%, that is why I wrote the post. I didn't reveal it too much in there, but as a non-technical founder, there are ways to make it work.
I think IT professionals should plan their retirement by 40.
http://www.google.com/search?name=f&hl=en&q=oxytocin...
Software is an art because the tools, components, and abstractions are so incomplete, and so numerous, that it becomes impossible to calculate what will happen without trial and error.
Not to mention the flat-out lies.

"In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings."

The US does not restrict access to most of those things, as far as I know. The only exceptions are child pornography laws, gambling, and presumably state secrets are also kept off the net.

And hardly any countries restrict access to "superstitious content." I suspect that's only the case in communist countries, where atheism is mandatory. In fact, I didn't even realize China did this; what do they do, ban www.dontwalkbehindladders.com ?
A few unrelated thoughts:
I've seen some of the brightest people get shipped back to their home country after their "practical training" (the year allowed for work after a foreigner's college graduation). This is the worst type of protectionism, bordering on xenophobia. Our country was built by great immigrants, period.

Secondly, most emerging economies emphasize math and sciences much more than America. If the awards were for art and literature we'd likely see more diversity here.

And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs, or some job that pays well but is provincial and soul crushing.
Why is the current notability clause the right one for Wikipedia? (I don't think it is. I think it's needlessly exclusionary.)
http://www.linutop.com/index.en.html
I thought it was hard to get money out of China, and assumed that it would be correspondingly hard to change Yuan to Dollars. Is that not the case?
If what you say is true, we'd have electronic voting. Why don't we have that?

Physical engineers face unknowns all the time. Building in unknown environments for example. New materials. Climate change. I can't even count the number of different designs for bridges, buildings, and cranes.
I'm betting on a placebo effect of the melatonin. taken in pill form it is only effective for a few hours.
While some of the staying-up-lateness may be self imposed, my Google searches show that puberty brings with it a natural change in circadian rythym, which isn't something the teens can do much about.

http://www.healthcentral.com/sleep-disorders/caregiving-2708...

http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/adolescent.html
The Microwave Mortuary
I think at a minimum, a game needs some kind of structure, and that the consequences of the game - the outcome - isn't particularly important. The structure is necessary to prevent people from going too far - "fair play" - and the outcome needs to be relatively irrelevant - "it's only a game" - so that people don't take it too seriously, precisely so they can have fun.

I don't think either of these things is true about life.

I think games are a human formalization of the animal notion of play, which is about developing reactions and experiences in a safe way, unlike how they will be used for real stakes as an adult. Play fighting isn't real fighting, but uses many of the same reactions and develops techniques.

But real fighting isn't a game.
Absolutely.

The way I see it is that there are a number of ingredients involved in successfully doing a startup: Marketing, sales, finance, people, luck, ambition, domain knowledge, etc. You can be weak in one area but then you'll have to compensate in other areas to make it up.

I know a very successful founder of a tech company (yearly turnover 8 figures), and he has no idea how to hack. But he does have acute people skills, and he's brilliant at sales. He was also lucky that he got into a domain that had a lot of possibility.

I also know a guy that's a brilliant programmer, but his projects never go anywhere. He doesn't know how to sell his product, and he's afraid of giving up control. The inevitable result is that noone has ever heard of him or his company.
I didn't say anything about which language should be spoken on HN. I think the sticking point is the word "valid", and my opinion on that is that location does have bearing. Take my island example above. Would you argue that the meaning I assigned to "I'm drinking water" as "I'm going fishing" would be valid English anywhere in the world? I think that would be absurd, because if we are to accept that then the construct of languages breaks down entirely, and people will eventually be hurling sounds at each another hoping someone discerns their intended meaning.
I think non-technical founders have a harder time building a profit-based company (like 37signals or Plenty of Fish, his examples) because how do you get a programmer on board to build the thing if you can't pay them?

Imagine the job ad: "Wanted: Engineering Bitch."

http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/startup-lessons-for-the...
Ask HN: Japanese search engine query data or query feed?
I am interested in analysing Japanese query data for a project. Search datasets are typically hard to come by, but there are a few American datasets (Excite, AlltheWeb, the notorious AOL search logs). Anyone know of a similar Japanese language dataset? Even a feed of recent queries -- something like http://www.searchhippo.com/queryview.php -- would be useful if it is updated frequently.
Thanks
It's not our place to say how another country should be run by another people.

There's a difference between dictating what others should do and leading by example. Google doesn't care what other search engines in China do, they're just saying that they do not wish to censor anything on their search engine. If this is unacceptable to the Chinese government, they should just kick Google out instead of whining about it.

Of course multi-national companies are coloured by their original culture, this cannot be a surprise to anyone, yet that is exactly what the Chinese government is acting like.
JavaScript: what is "this"?
... and if you only ever make one request, from one user, over and over and over again.

ab -n 10000 -c 1 -C '_redmine_session=9ec759408f1ae3c6f919e50baba5a3dc; path=/' http://127.0.0.1/
Requests per second: 2839.37 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 0.352 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.352 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

This is an extremely unrealistic workload. It's the best possible scenario for your caches. Yes, he says he was also browsing and editing the site at the same time, but that's still nothing like modeling the real effects of cache invalidation & overflow from many concurrently users.
This article is like the tail wagging the dog.

Krugman made a name for himself challenging the very assumption that free trade always leads to mutually beneficial outcomes. If you want to take him on with regard to trade theory, you can't simply respond with the original orthodoxy that protectionism is bad and free trade is good. You'd have to address his specific arguments about economies of scale and the possibility of being "locked-into" a bad trade situation (at a local maximum).

There's a little bit about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#New_trade_theory
Sorry, I was inprecise. Of course sysadmins do not solve buffer overflows, they solve what happens when someone exploits one.

I understand what you are saying, you see that the flight to the moon was done by something equivalent to C64 and today we are allow wasting orders of magnitude more computing power.

What I'm trying to tell you, look at the whole picture. There is a cost associated with writing and maintaing software. That hand optimized assembly application is going to be more expensive (and take longer to deliver) than the Java/c#/whatever equivalent. There is another cost associated with purchasing and operating hardware (that includes paying sysadmins, for example). The business has to consider what is more effective, and usually HL language/more HW is the more efficient solution.

What, more efficient, you say? We were talking about wasting the computer power. Yes, more efficient overall. We have a method for measuring wasting resources - money. You are going either waste some money on hardware/electricity/floor space/sysadmins, or programmers/time to deliver/managing larger team/managing recruiting and retaining competent programmers. Not only is the former cheaper, it is also easier to quantify and manage. It is no wonder, that you do not see companies taking the later approach.

At the end, what most people do not understand (not only technical people, but most people) is that successful enterprise is not a 100% efficient one. There is going to be waste, but it must be in the right spot. Actually, conceptually it is similar to profiling, you don't optimize spots that do not matter in the big picture. And computing power does not matter for most business, it is a cheap resource. People, on the other hand, is not.
I think you would be surprised at how much of the "misery" you and your peers are self-imposing.

It's a pity the article is so long, because otherwise you might have encountered this sentence before composing a reply:

It won't be enough to demand an early hour for going to bed. If you ban the late evening Internet surfing, you will just swap a dose of evening education for an idle tossing and turning in bed.

You can't necessarily change your biological clock by an effort of will, even if you know exactly what you are doing -- which few people do. Your biological clock has a "mind" of its own. No matter how much "responsibility" you take for your schedule, and how much intelligence and full-spectrum lighting you apply to the problem, you may find yourself unable to be optimally awake at 7am. Especially if you are a teenager.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid that everything about this reply rubs me the wrong way. It is a textbook example of its kind [1], and it illustrates why broken designs persist for decade upon decade. School day starts too early for the typical young person's biological clock? We survived it, so should you! Third-shift workers causing accidents at 3am? Your grandpa worked third shift and survived with 80% of his fingers intact; so should you! Medical interns forced to work continuous shifts of 24 hours or more, even though studies have shown that they therefore make avoidable errors that harm patients? We survived it, so should you!

It's so much easier to instruct the victim on coping techniques than it is to contemplate changing the system that it becomes a reflex: You poke an adult, and out pops a sanctimonious lecture.

---

[1] The world would be a better place if every text editor came with an alarm that rang every time someone typed the word peers. ("Hi! Microsoft Word has noticed that you sound just like your mom! Can Clippy help you with that?")
One thing that's interesting is to track where these child prodigy/overachiever types wind up later in life. Some of them can't be found in a Google search, which probably means they didn't start any companies, publish any papers, or anything like that.

Others wind up leading very distinguished careers, like Terence Tao.
While the 8 hrs of just about any manual labor job is much more work than 8 hrs at school, at least you don't have to worry about it when you go home.

I worked several manual labor jobs during summer breaks in high school, and the freedom to think about whatever you wanted at night (instead of homework or activities) was at least mentally liberating, even if I was dead tired from moving boxes of tomatoes all day.
It may be because I am currently dealing with a tax error that's causing a nightmare from a previous startup, but I feel like the government keeps saying to me through all these complicated tax rules and increases, "Please don't do another startup. Please don't build things for people or create jobs. Yeah, we'll let you, but we'll make your life a huge annoyance if you try."

I like to hack and I like building things for customers, but last week I spent most of the week filling out government forms. Another 3.8% on investment income (plus the proposed 5% cap gains increase for a total of 8.8%) won't kill me, but it's starting to feel like the straw the broke the camel's back. I'll probably do the next startup. At the same time, I angel invest in 3-4 companies a year. I like to find kids who were like me at some university labs, invest in their ideas, and what them create cool companies. I may give that up.

Since this isn't a political forum, I won't say which side I'm for. But I will say that I'm angry at both sides for the $1T giveaway to the investment bankers and now to the way the CBO numbers have been gamed.

(tmp acct, b/c I don't want to discuss my tax issues under the regular acct)
That's a good post, and I agree with you. However, I never said anything about not paying them. Pre-seed funding for non-technical founders should go towards that in order to get an alpha built.
Julien from Superfeedr here. Please get in touch wit any issue/question you may have. I'm sorry Micah had so many issues and I'll try to help him find his way.
Whoa. It takes more than a turtle to make a Logo. The neat thing about Logo was that kids, even at an extremely young age, could leverage their budding English language skills to do some amazing things in very Lisp-y ways, starting with something as simple as "tell turtle go up 5" and seeing that work. No defs, no need to build scaffolding of any kind to get immediate feedback. This may be simple, but there'd be a lot of hand-holding needed for the little 'uns.
Here's a better test: if you listen to people who tell you what you can't do you probably won't be a good founder.
China is being really nice about it, IMO. If it was an ordinary citizen running a search engine, they'd be in jail -- or suicided.
Micah, I'm sorry the experienced wasn't as smoothed as expected. We can definetely help. I left some comments on your blog. Please get in touch.
Pfffsssht. you sound like China isn't full of arbitrary laws that make it impossible to be "legal". You also sound like the people living there are represented by their government, as opposed to being ruled by it.

Note, it's the "laws" of the CCP's dictatorship, not the citizens.

And all Google is doing is attempting to operate without complete political censorship, of things that embarrass the CCP.

Your a shill, probably a poorly paid one.
Those millions of individuals are already in the health care system. The primary impact of the bill seems to be whether their contact with the system bankrupts them or not. Either way, the hospital isn't getting $3,500 for the MRI they just ran.

Your concerns all seem very reasonable. In particular, the distortion of the concept of "insurance". But, two things.

First, that distortion already took place. Providers and insurers have spent the last two decades colluding on pricing and process in ways that transformed Blue Cross from an insurer to a poorly-regulated utility.

Second, your concerns are orthogonal to the debate. We should train more doctors, and we should create more tiers of service (nurse practitioner clinics in particular). That has little to do with whether we should allow de facto monopolies to lock consumers out of the healthcare market.
How is the government asking you not to create jobs? I'm unclear on that.
I think i have a DSPS too, but instead of fighting it, i live with my cycle (around 25 hours). Impossibility to work in office hours forces me to be independent, so it's not so bad.
Those are great examples. There are a multitude of things to do in a company, and everything has to work in unison. I also think you write a very good blog, the posts are great.
I've been using this for the past couple of years in my day job. The ability to pull in .NET assemblies is very powerful and is a real godsend in a Microsoft environment.
This growing sentiment that everything is a game is annoying and troublesome. Annoying in that this style of unoriginal regurgitant blogging is just plain terrible, and troublesome in that the tech-exit-inspired delusion of grandeur has spilled over into personal manifestos of life.

Games are games. Sports are games. Conveniently enough, we invented sport to be tangible versions of our dreams; a dry run to test hypotheses, so we don’t make the same mistakes in life, when it counts.

This is profound? I’ll play cranky old man’s advocate: If this doesn’t irritate you, something’s wrong.
I think a domain expert can be a stronger founder than a programmer, if it's the right kind of domain. You either need to know what needs to be built, or how to build it, to have a chance (ideally, you'd know both)

I'll bet with 99% certainty a non-programmer cannot run a successful programming tool startup, though :)
I build startups. So far, pretty small, but I've created 16 jobs so far in my career (approximately--it's hard to track what happens to your org after acquisition). I'm proud of that.

I also angel invest. Thus far, those companies aren't that old, but my marginal contribution is worth at least several jobs.

When they make it a hassle to create startups and to invest, I spend less time building startups and more time chilling at home. When they make it more expensive, I do less angel investing. It's hard to quantify--I can't tell you how much impact it has on me personally (though it definitely has some). But when instead of looking at me individually, you look at the expected values across aggregates, economists show real, substantial effects.

And, time many, many hours I've wasted on forms, letters, arguments, etc recently are all time that could have been spent coding or with customers.
Hey thanks :-) It's not updated as as often as I'd like though...
I think that is of fairly minor consequence to the overall success of my business. I've been #1 for that phrase for almost four years now -- and as of four years ago, it was worth about 150 visits a month, or substantially less than five sales. "Whee."

It is worth more these days, but that is because people searching for [bingo card creator] are probably looking for Bingo Card Creator (for example, with five seconds of checking into my stats, I can guarantee at least 30% of folks searching for it last week and clicking on my site already have an account with me).

(Have I mentioned that "Google owns navigation on the Internet"?)
> It's not difficult. Get a good debugger, and you're job is easy.

Easy for a sysadmin to say! How many web apps have you written in C lately?

> It's not hard, just takes a little more time

Yeah -- just long enough to go out of business ;)
Can you offer some insight into the recent forms, letters, and arguments? I'm wondering what I have to look forward to.
What happens if you use both melatonin & co-q-10?
I thought this was going to be about web-app entrepreneurs. And by the way, can anyone think of a less sleazy word for tech start-up people than "entrepreneur"?
>Java is slow

No, it's not. Modern JVMs produce extremely fast code. For numeric calculations, there's essentially no difference in speed between Java and C. (After all, why would there be? The JVM has static type info and is emitting assembly.) This was true even in 2004, so it's really long overdue that you move on from 1995 :)

http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html

>If you were to write your code in something more "close to the metal"

C is close to the PDP-11; it's not particularly close to modern hardware.
How I Judge Investors
These aren't really good examples in my opinion. The "condensed" version is not better, because it makes one thing much worse: it is now hard to change the contents of the loop.

Especially when working with larger data sets, you need to be able to do whatever is necessary within a single loop over the data, to avoid lousy runtime. In the article's example, by automatically filtering out even numbers to do ONE operation, it is now very hard to modify that loop to perform other operations on numbers that may not be even.

In my practical experience, a "real" for-loop is almost always more flexible and valuable, and is just as clear.
In other countries anyone that does anything computer related is an informaticien. I don't like it because it's used as a catchall for an entire industry (tech support all the way up to engineer). And, atleast in the US, informatics implies information science. A degree you get when you want to be a research librarian.
`method2` looks buggy.

On the question "who whould want to use", here's an example:

OrderedSet could be implemented using double-linked list http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576696-orderedset-with-w...

Here's "real code" from stdlib (OrderedDict implementation) http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/collections.py?v...
Since when is "entrepreneur" a sleazy word?
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Mark Pincus (Zynga)

I mean is this even a serious question?