skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I challenge anyone with a painful but non-life-threatening injury - say, a torn labrum, or a torn ACL - to go live in Canada or the UK and see what their treatment is like compared to here. Anyone?
I think Microsoft has been dragged into this and they aren't embracing it nearly quick enough. Primesense has been distributing an open source sdk for a while now http://www.openni.org/ and Microsoft want to keep some control of the device. They still haven't allowed any indie developer access to the Kinect on the Xbox and they are in danger of completely blowing the potential of the device as the next paradigm of people interacting with computers in their living rooms.
is this even legal? imagine Microsoft asking 30% of sales for Windows based apps ...
From what I've read, and experienced with Flash on the OS X desktop, the issue was caused by Flash beating up hard on the CPU (and thereby causing a battery drain). The last thing Apple wants is to list a battery life in the specs, and then watch some Flash based game decimate it.
Computing in the Old Dominion
How much of that is subsidized by your taxes? That counts towards the final cost. Spreading it out doesn't make it less real.

edit: answered for you:

>In 2009, the government funded about 70% of Canadians' health care costs.

>Per capita expenditure in 2009: 3,895

$227 per month, per person, comes from the government, which gets its funding from your taxes. So you're paying $801/month for that plan (three people). Significantly less than many Americans, there's no debating that, but $120/month isn't anywhere near correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada
I appreciated the comments about staying bootstrapped if at all possible. Often, I hear conversation about landing VC funding as the end goal. While this can help develop a product if necessary, that funding will likely be more trouble than it is worth.
It has nothing to do with the hardware. Apple gives access to a sales platform, similar to let's say Amazon. They charge for the use of that platform. And are now preventing someone to use it as a mere "springboard" to somewhere else. Nothing is stoping anyone from creating a web app to take care of this by them selves, independent of the app store.
A physician’s son
I am really passionate about this topic. I am double majoring in Japanese studies and CompSci and try to mix the two as best as I can. I wrote a web app for collaborative translation of classical Japanese texts for one my courses and it was a complete success (a book partly produced by the program via a TeX template will soon be release). I also wrote several other web apps, for dictionaries and handwriting recognition, for example. One thing I usually hear from teachers and other students is that they love these programs, but have no idea how to get them. They usually don't want to learn programming themselves, but would like to have someone who can program something simple if they tell them to. Maybe this problem is restricted to my case (German University of Tübingen), but there is no one here in the faculty (of the Asian studies department) who could teach simple programming, or even state why it is needed. Instead, I have seen people ignoring technological helpers (morphological parsers, programming languages like Perl, Python or Ruby) because they are "too complicated". These people will still do everything by hand (or sometimes with word macros) that could be done by a simple program, and will waste months of time.

Another aspect I like about introducing programming to the humanities is that it can act as a grounding element to the sometimes lofty ideas that people tend to have. A lot of things in the humanities (like the interpretation of a medieval Japanese texts) seem extremely vague, but are actually only extremely complicated. Quantitative analysis of a text can give you the means to pass qualitative judgments.
I understand that, however they say:

Primary driver for migrating to MongoDB was for performance. MySQL didn't work for them.

so I am asking what was the real reason for migrating. Performance doesn't seem to be an issue here. If it's about preferences, no problem at all then.
My early-twenties girlfriend is able to stay on her dad's health insurance. Which is good because she has a chronic condition that would cancel any chance of purchasing individual insurance.

So yes, people have seen benefits.
This is the dark side of the Canadian system. Long waits for elective care. My dad is a doctor near the Canadian border and a good % of patients in his local system are Canadians who are coming down to pay out of pocket for elective surgeries they would have to wait for years to get in Canada. On the other hand, another hot business in my homeland was sending busloads of senior citizens up to Canada to buy cheaper generic drugs.
Measurably worse results than where? It's measurably better than many places.

I say it because many many many other places subsidize healthcare at least as much as America does. And people don't seem to count the taxes they pay as part of the monthly cost.

edit: edited my top comment, sources are there. Canadians, famous for cheap healthcare, pay $324 per month per person for healthcare. The government covers $227 of that, which means $227 per person per month comes from taxes.
Wasn't Netflix functionality something Apple used as a selling point for the iPad?
Kudos to you. So many people equate fat to increasing your fat. Granted, drinking a glass of bacon grease is no good for you, but replacing it with chemically altered low-fat everything is not a viable replacement.
Canada has more opportunities than people, which is why getting in is particularly easy.
Him in particular, 10 years. Probably his risk category may be similar or even better into his 30s though.

But nobody claimed he in particular should have the same policy or the same rate for the rest of his life. The point of insurance is to aggregate risk over large populations.
It's now drastically easier for retailers to sell goods on credit, and it's vastly easier for customers to pay electronically. 10-15 years ago, you couldn't swipe your ATM/credit card at the grocery store.

On the flip side, credit cards are currently riddled with serious, yet solvable security problems. Identity theft is one. ATM skimmers is another. There are also pretty grim privacy implications to the way things work. Finally, banks used to do some rather ridiculous things with penalty rates and fees until they were prohibited by law.

This system probably did people some good in the 90s, but right now it seems inefficient and dated. I believe that with modern technologies it's definitely possible to create something much better.
Very good point. You also may not have had the means to do it even if you had the knowledge. But how about at least show a post from 2007 or before that confirms you knew these clearly predictable events would happen.

My frustration is with someone claiming that they knew or that it was very predictable when they were simply WORRIED it would happen. Many of us worry about a lot of things. That doesn't mean when something finally goes wrong we get to say "see? I knew it would happen."
As the creator of a similar oscilloscope hack (the Terminalscope: http://hackaday.com/2010/02/24/oscilloscope-doubles-as-a-ser...) I find this very cool. If Craig is reading this, thanks for the shout-out :)

I'm not intimately familiar with the Game Boy's video signals, but I wonder: why the fancy microcontroller and digital-to-analog converters? The Terminalscope just uses a couple of op-amps to generate the horizontal and vertical sweeps. The microcontroller doesn't have to worry about moving the beam, so the refresh rate is very high and there's no flicker.

Maybe I should try this with my old Game Boy: the LCD is starting to die anyway...
> As a group you have more leverage purchasing pretty much any service

although this is true, the leverage gained through group is different for other services, where a bulk order is much cheaper.
Assuming everyone's making rational decisions, the only people that would want insurance would be the high risk ones. Insurance companies would loss money regardless of the rates they charge because the only rational people that would pay it would be the ones that think they would likely benefit from it, since they have additional information (eating habit, risk level, etc ) over the insurance company. By putting a lot of people (high risk and low risk) in a group, the insurance company can balance out the group and make a small gain on top of the expected payout.
Who's old enough to remember the "crisis" around Object Oriented? There was a time when the majority of mainstream programmers didn't really know what Object Oriented was, there was a lot of marketing noise confusing the situation, and skeptics declared it all to be snake oil.

I think Objects won in the end, though. Or is it still common for someone to write a big heap of procedural code, use polymorphism once, then call the whole thing, "Object Oriented?"
I might be living in a socialist paradise (Australia) or some thing but my last visit to the doctor (broken toe) was free.

I am truly horrified by the state of the US health system, sure Australia's might be a bit messed up at times but it is so much better than what Americans have to deal with.

Move your startup to Australia! Seriously, cheap/free heathcare for minor->medium problems (the bad stuff is still going to throw up some major bills but not bankruptcy worthy). As a plus we have a superior economy right now, better living standards and hot women.

Not sure the state of the laws regarding Americans access to our healthcare but worth a look.
The irony of all these comments is the US government actually does pay for a lot of health care costs...

"In 2006, 70% of health care spending in Canada was financed by government, versus 46% in the United States."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_s...
Conventions vary from DSL to DSL. The flexibility doesn't have to be used by the application programmer to be useful. Think of how gemfiles or Rspec would look without optional parentheses in method calls. Even though parens are usually the way to go, sometimes you want different conventions in your DSL.
yes, sorry - i spent the better part of a year studying that in depth and got rather used to using the acronym :)
I don't know, but whenever we have a power cut, it refuses to cook for us afterwards until we tell it the time.
What's the point of catastrophic insurance if they can drop you when you need it? It seems like you're paying for nothing.
EmPower: The World’s First Electronic Focusing Eyeglasses
It's very difficult to price-shop, though, because unlike in most normal businesses, nobody seems to publish price lists, and they aren't very forthcoming giving quotes over the phone, either. So it's not too uncommon to end up with something absurd more or less by chance, especially if it's urgent to see a doctor.

Unless I've totally missed it, there's certainly no hipmunk for medicine, where I can put in that I want X service, and get a list of doctors and prices within a 50-mile radius.
For most insurance, patients pay 30% copay maximum for any procedure (emergency or standard), but the minimum monthly payment (yes, it's not due all at once, which I think should also be legislated here in the States) is capped according to income.

Hospitals are private, and both they and doctors negotiate every two years to set prices for everything from MRIs to stitches. The insurance industry is also private, but they have a public-run insurer for Japanese poor. AFAIK, taxes are taken just for the public-run insurance, to which only a small percentage of Japanese apply, but for private insurance (which the rest are mandated to have), it's paid through premiums per month, which is on average about $250/mo per family (and employers pay for almost all of that).
Wristwatches are like the buttons on a sleeves of a suit jacket, little or no functionality needed but fashionable as long as they are out of the way. The last thing we need are smarter buttons.
The Unbundling of Media
> Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills.

If my own background is anything to go by, CS is almost a textbook university subject: it presents a lot of theory and academic analysis, much of which certainly does underpin practical software development, but the emphasis is not on teaching specific applications, nor on teaching the supporting practical skills required to implement those applications. These things are experienced to some extent via examples that accompany the theory, and to a greater extent via reading around the subject and experimentation where the course has provided enough context to direct the student's personal study.

IMHO, one of the major differences between good and bad courses is that those that are taught well will also encourage the student to explore useful applications for what they are learning in this way, and thus to experience not only the practical implications of what they are learning but also the surrounding tools, processes and techniques that go with them in the real world.

Someone with a broad foundation in the theory and experience of varied practical applications should have no difficult adapting to other applications the same theory, nor to newer theories that have evolved through industrial R&D and not yet made it back into academia. Whether a recruitment process is any good at recognising this important ability to adapt and learn independently is an entirely different question, but any remotely useful process should be able to weed out the people who managed to spend 3-4 years studying theory without experimenting practically and reading around their subject, and avoiding hiring those is one of the most important basic goals of any software developer recruitment exercise IME.
Does this maintain a canvas on the server?
Even most newborns were presumably born in a hospital. Guess that's a pre-existing condition too.
Thanks for the info!

> I'm not sure how consistent hashing helps when adding nodes to a "real" DB, either ... How does consistent hashing help with the migration?

Instead of backfilling all data to an entirely new cluster, you'd only backfill the small amount of data from the keyspace "stolen" by the new node, and expire the keys at the original locations. If you use M replicas of each node around the ring (typically M << N) you only involve M+1 nodes in the migration process.

I'm still experimenting with this idea myself, and would also love to know if anyone's tried something similar with data store sharding (not just with caching).
Yeah, I would like to make the replies much smarter & possibly include who is there ("Welcome Mark, Brian just got here"). Additionally it would be nice to proactively text people ("Mark, where are you? 3 of your friends have already arrived and are waiting for you"). I think there are a lot of fun things to add.
Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...) so it's tough to claim a purely phonetic system is 'far better.' It certainly has advantages, but the issue is not as clear cut as, say, arabic numerals vs. roman.
I believe organizations like local Chambers of Commerce do this.
Your success in getting private health insurance may be due to the fact that you have "been approved for and paid for my own insurance for years". Bear in mind that the OP had group health insurance through her employer, and then tried to get private health insurance. I had much the same experience with minor things from the time I had group insurance being considered "pre-existing conditions" and justifying a denial of coverage.

After many long hours of paperwork and going through the appeal process (including getting letters from doctors certifying that my minor ailments were unlikely to require expensive surgery) I now have private health insurance. I never would have imagined it would be this hard.
The way it works is they bill outrageous amounts in the expectation that they will either be totally stiffed or have to negotiate a much lower settlement (which is essentially what insurance companies do, AFAIK). In the rare case where somebody actually pays the full bill, they're subsidizing care for those who walk out on the bill (or part of it). This strikes me as an extremely broken way of doing things, but it seems to be the norm, so maybe it's a really, really bad Nash equilibrium.
By the way, if you couldn't reserve a slot, give us some feedback:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=d...
The irony is: the same Congresscritters who vote against universal health insurance get top-notch health insurance paid for by taxpayers: http://www.suite101.com/content/health-care-for-the-us-congr...

After 5 years of service, they get lifetime health insurance, the same as all federal employees and retirees:http://www.opm.gov/insure/retirees/index.asp?MainQuestionId=...
I couldn't get surgery approved on my employer's health insurance. I eventually decided not to let that stop me from changing jobs and doing what I wanted to do, despite not being able to afford surgery out of pocket and despite an inferior choice of health insurance plans. I suppose I could emigrate to England if all else fails. I can do this as my mother was a British citizen otherwise than by descent, though it is an involved process.

The present system is designed to impose a huge negative externality on would-be entrepreneurs and others who might have left their jobs to pursue other opportunities. And you are subsidizing the profits of the industries that benefit from the relative immobility of labor. That negative externality you pay is someone else's subsidy. If it were up to me, I'd rather pay into a universal health care system than pay the negative externality to stay tied to an employer on account of health care coverage.

Another negative externality is the administrative burden imposed on companies to handle employee health care.
I really don't see the point of carrying a wristwatch. While it may save the odd second or two compared to grabbing your phone to check the time, why would you want to put yourself under the constant pressure of a watch?

If you have to check the watch all the time, something is wrong in your life.
Voice of America (VOA) hacked?
In play betting
Hey Dave, any chance I can get a beta invite to chart.io? :)
> you'd only backfill the small amount of data from the keyspace "stolen" by the new node

I think this is the part I'm not so sure about.

Say I have 100 stats, and of course each stat is per forum, per day (going back from 1 day to ... 5 years?). How do I know what keys were just "stolen"? Do I have my new-node code hash every possible key (all stats for all forums for all hours for all time) to see which might go to that node? And then it reverses that key to know what it "means" to backfill it? (I need to do that followup post as the way our data 'flows' in is applicable here)
I call bullshit. If you have flash disabled or set on-demand in your browser preferences, there is no change in the overall speed or responsiveness of your device, in comparison to flash not being installed.
+1

If the Republicans are serious about an economic recovery and want startups to flourish, then universal healthcare is a cornerstone of such an effort. I know of other people too who are afraid of leaving their (big-company) positions because they have a wife + young kids, and lack of health insurance terrifies them.
Masterfuck!
> This app can't go down, and it can't be wrong.

Shops who set the bar this high and mean it are exceptionally rare (I look for them when I'm on the market). Where I am now, an hour of downtime costs us my salary for weeks, and still we cut corners that don't always sit right with me.

But having generalist engineers create functional and integration test plans? Not only do we tend to cost more, but we have less experience at it than QA specialists. And a dev shouldn't test their own work, because they won't notice any unwarranted assumptions they made in design and coding.
Redefining Digital Imaging. Is it a hardware issue, a software issue or both?
Nowadays with digital photography and imaging consumers and manufacturers are in a mega-pixel craze. The next best thing always has more resolution crammed into the same space for a higher quality image. And then the bells and whistles kick in with the ability to record audio/video, lcd touch screens, a flash, zoom capability and the works. However, in most senses, the technology is the same. It's light that gets captured as a certain color within a certain position in the view of the lens, which then gets converted to a pixel of an image that gets converted into some sort of raster technology like the JPEG.

But what if I wanted to say, "locate the red VW Jetta"? The camera has no understanding of what that is. The camera doesn't know Johnathan from Natalia, even though we do. I think we're moving into a time where the consumer will want that. Just as they are able voice activate their Ford Fusion and tell it what song to play, or to check their Facebook page, I don't think that wanting the camera to be able to distinguish one object from another and then appropriately capture it is far behind.

How do we do that? How do we develop an imaging system that works similar to the human brain in a way such that it can distinguish the difference between two people after being given the definition of them? Or between two cars, or even just two colors to start. I say "photograph the blue ball" and it focuses heavily on that in the image and puts the red ball out of focus.

Is that a hardware issue? Do we have to develop an entirely new way of capturing images that isn't based on pixels and raster technology? Is it just a software issue and we need to develop better software to reach that type of interaction with our imaging equipment?

The best example I can think of visually is Iron Man 2 -- the inside interface within the suit helmet. I know it's all CGI, but the way the software was able to scan the screen and distinguish people from objects, weapons from non-weapons, and threats from non threats is the type of ability I'm speaking of.

I'm just sort of thinking out lout here...

Any thoughts?
I'm not sure you can. It's a natural response to people trying to make money selling a process. All processes are succeptible to it.

The only real avoidance technique is to have certification of trainers and organisations, and THEN you're going to run into the prevaling (and mostly accurate) IT wisdom that "Certs are Bullshit".
Importing people from anywhere else is on it's way out in the US as well. (even willingly)
If you read through most software licenses, whether click-through or break-the-seal arrangements, the wording comes down to you are being granted a license to use the software, not a transfer of ownership of any actual property.

Hardware is different. Unless you specifically sign a contract like a lease that makes some arrangement other than the traditional you bought it, you own it scenario you can do whatever you want with a piece of purchased hardware. The have been cases in the past, for example DirecTV receivers where the hardware purchase price had a built in subsidy, requiring you to sign up for a subscription. When people started paying cash (instead of the usual credit card sale for a $300 item) and not activating the hardware (because they were easy to hack) DirecTV changed the way retailers were allowed to sell the hardware.

People keep getting the iOS software, and the related devices confused, thinking of them as a single entity. You own your hardware, but you don't own the underlying software. Among other things, the lawsuits targeted at the company that was selling OS X loaded on clone hardware (forget the name) also seemed to prove this out.
Only news source I can find: http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-4521-Iranian+hackers+target+...

Credit claimed by "Iranian Cyber Army"
I will look at the local organizations. Thank you!