skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't surprise me that your friends and family differ in opinion (I have been surprised to not find one in my circle that supports the bill).

That said, one family member in particular is a nurse practicioner at a major trauma center. Her primary concern is not the billing disputes as much as the actual quality of care. She feels that her hospital is already inundated with somewhat reckless medicaid requests. She believes that 60% of medicaid patients at her hospital seek medical care that they don't need (e.g., person has a basic headache that some rest or an aspirin would surely cure but instead they actually seek professional medical attention). If that visit were to come at a slightly greater cost, there is no way that person would go to an emergency room for a headache.

It sounds like a dramatic example but she says crazy incidents like this happens every single day, w/o fail. So much so that they track and keep a monthly log that helps them measure their performance. As such, the hospital's resources are strained and their ability to treat seriously ill or injured patients is somewhat compromised. So I think the concern on her part is that the new health care bill actually exacerbates this problem.

I understand that selling across state lines could violate states rights. At the same time, it's too bad that many (myself included) wouldn't trust the fed to be in charge of interstate oversight. In reality, it might be better to have one consolidated standard of mandates but I just can't imagine fed efficiently and accurately providing that type of oversight.
If you are just counting announcements there are tons of android tablet announcements, iPad 2's release could still be months away.
How about instead of insisting they use the tool correctly, you learn about what it means that they're misusing it.

This is a VERY common thing. It means that people tend to not want certain people initiating conversations with them, but they have no problem doing so when they need something.

It's a tool, it doesn't have a correct use case. Just common and uncommon.
yes, maybe mercurial is a way to share org files, but I'd go for a centralized database tracker for team tracking.
But for personal tracking, I just love org. Fast and flexible.
Grails FTW :)
Pie chart? I have no idea how to interpret this...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amit-agarwal/3196386402/sizes/l...
What It's Like to Work for Donald Rumsfeld (short)
Training tomorrow's scientists
Interesting. Of course I am thinking of the many ways that the results might not be representative, but that doesn't make it any less of a cool weekend project.

Would be great to see some context around where the most _profanities_ occur by language, and the kind used.
Mechanical control of conductance through a single molecule junction
how do you know what the market demands? you know through sales. The market liked a big iPhone 3, so it is reasonable to predict that they will like a big iPhone 4.

Feature list:

- front facing camera
- "retinal" display
- iPhone 4 style designing
Best wishes for your upcoming launch! You must be excited!

Thanks for your feedback. Based on what the group has said here, I'm going to invite a few people to privately test it with me and then expand to a larger audience.
My uncle was driving a truck a few years ago and hit a woman who walked in front of his vehicle. It was not his fault because the woman stepped out looking the wrong way, and the wet weather and short distance meant it wasn't possible for him to stop in time.

In this instance, the GPS tracking data was used by the police to verify that he was not travelling faster than the speed limit. The data backed up his statement to the police and he therefore wasn't considered negligent or liable for the accident in any way.

Technology like this certainly has its benefits, particularly when the presumption of guilt is so often on the driver in this kind of situation.
Visualization: Movies Are Getting Worse
A lot of people are saying they'd cancel Netflix the moment amazon increases their selection but in order to do that amazon will have to raise prices. That means it'll probably cost more than Netflix and you'll probably not make the move since most wont need fast shipping AND streaming movies.
Just as a quick tip (from someone who has run for about 20 years now)... What "meditating" just means is keeping your focus on a given thought/feeling/whatever... so it truly can be anything... whether it's music, running, a concept like love, the present, etc... you'll get the same root benefit, which is a capability to direct your focus. Obviously the secondary benefits come from the type of meditation you're doing.

When you run, you're usually not trying to focus on a thought in your head (although you can)... usually you're focused on the present experience - the pain, the pleasure, the runners high, the beauty of nature around you, etc.

However, any true runner here will tell you the thing that brings the greatest mental focus is pain. We LOVE pain. The greater the pain, the greater the pleasure. It's odd, but the more pain you experience the more you have to use every ounce of mental energy and focus (i.e. meditation) to overcome it.

That's why my easy runs almost always result in me picking up the pace and murdering the second half as compared to the first... There's something I just love about the pain and focus. Same with why when I've had a stressful day the first thing I want to do is just pound out a blistering pace on a treadmill. The pain gets your focus off everything else.

We runners are insane though, so if you're just into jogging, I'd suggest focusing on the beauty of nature and the present. When I manage to stick to a jog, usually I use it to just reflect on all that is good, thanking God just to be alive, for nature, etc... Helps to have existing cardio training so you can talk to yourself while jogging. If you do push the pace and get tired or feel pain, change it to a repetitive positive thought track like "I can do it" or something. Usually that's kinda in beat to my steps too. Each step closer you ultimately realize you can, in fact, do it! Feels great.
The advantage of nihilism (or the pleasure of programming?)
How to offend members of 3 different programmer communities in 9 different ways with just one sentence: "It somehow makes sense that C++, Ruby, and JavaScript are all equally profane."
It is hard to release something not ready!!! I feel it's a reflection of me, but I need to get beyond that sensitivity or I'll never release anything. I'll keep you all informed.

Never thought about competition as sales staff before.
One that came to mind is certain languages being more popular in english vs. non-english speaking countries.
Better $/gb right now? Maybe they just don't require the performance?
The unknown fault that caught out Christchurch
Ask HN: Subscription pricing or one-off pricing 
I am thinking of adding payment to my new service. I want to know what the difference is between subscription and one-off payment. My service is a survey website which would likely not be used every month so i was thinking of using a one-time payment with the full features for a limited number of days. what are the disadvantages?
sadly, I do not, I was sure I had a reference somewhere but I am completely unable to find it again :(
and please the colors. Why the two greens and two blues? Use either two colors (to differentiate alternative elements) - you would not need this if this were a bar chart (which it should be) or use 8 markedly different colors.
Netflix doesnt stream off of Amazon and even if they do use cloudfront (which i highly doubt), they have other CDN's (Akamai,Limelight) off which they would stream traffic too. I do not see how it would be possible for Amazon to monitor that network activity and get information about Netflix.
Generative Radio: Music that never repeats
But, with Bayesian methods you're feeding in prior information which can itself be flawed. When it comes to some question like 'What is reliability of the space shuttle?' the largest uncertainty in the calculation is that there is some failure mode you haven't thought of. Despite decades of changes to the space shuttle to improve safety, the official estimate of the failure probability hasn't changed since 1975.

In conventional logic, we say that a reasoning method is sound if it never comes to correct conclusions. One version of 'A of E' -> 'E of A' is the "closed world assumption" which, in one variant, means that "if you haven't been presented with X, then not(X) is true."

Now, we know that's not sound, not correct 100% of the time. However, when doing 'commonsense reasoning', the CWA can sometimes be a highly effective heuristic. (Note also that's there's no completely satisfactory way to deal with logical negation in knoweldge based systems at this time, so we've got to choose some poison, or otherwise deal with a system that "can't say no".

Part of that is that 'commonsense reasoning' is probabilistic. For instance, an effective hold 'em player has to estimate the probability of improving his hand at drawing, have a guess about what his opponent(s) may be holding, and how the opponent may respond to his actions. From that he's able to estimate odds which help him decide what to bet.

Poker's a pure example, but the same kind of probabilistic reasoning is necessary for hunting, software project management, scientific research, and many of things that people do.
Should we accept users first come first serve or filter them based on a simple survey and who we think would provide the best use cases.
Hi, Jason Scott here. Help is appreciated. Stop by #archiveteam on IRC and we'll chat.

The UTF-8 issue was known, fixed, and a framework setup to get any files missed. It was better to get started than spend more time on the problem as it was cropping up. Perfect is the enemy of done.

We're working together on a common goal and things are getting done. Join us if you have the time. Nobody needs to like me to do it.
I'm not sure I'd have used the words "in-depth", but here's what he says about bubbles: "We might be in a series of micro-bubbles, seed round prices being driven higher by VCs competing with angels for good seed deals. I don’t think we’re in a macro bubble. The total amount of money in the market or at risk is still very small."
This struck me as odd as well. In our RT, we have ~ 200,000 "ad hoc" issues tracked to date by a team distributed across three continents and for thousands of customers, with no complaints.

Request Tracker by Best Practical is an amazingly flexible product, straightforward, yet easily tweaked into whatever workflow most any organization could need.

That said, we use TRAC for software project management and project-based issue tracking.
the problem in this country is that not enough people are paying for their own health care or insurance.

Some people are getting medicare others are getting medicaid, others have benefits from the VA or a government job. Others get it from unions or employers. Only the people who are responsible for paying their own bills truly understand the state of our health care industry.

Because of that it is always someone else's problem and no one really minds paying 48k for 2 nights of saline drip in the hospital when the only cost to them is the 500.00 deductible. The hospital collecting the 48k certainly does not want that to change neither do any of the other predators in that food chain.

Put a high tax on employer sponsored insurance plans so that all employers stop offering it as a benefit. Then we will see real reform.
I'd kinda like to see which swear words appear most often in commit messages. I'm guessing that "shit" and "fuck" are much more common than "cocksucker" and "motherfucker", and if that's not true, I want to know which language has the most cocksuckers and motherfuckers.
What does he mean by "bare metal"? I've heard of attempts by Oracle to run directly on hardware, without an OS; does the same exist with mySQL and nginx? Or is he simply meaning not-a-VM?
Actually, an accelerometer is far, far less precise because something like going up a slight incline results in a pretty significant change in the horizontal acceleration but a comparatively small change in the vertical acceleration (which is easily lost in the noise). The rotation caused by starting to go up a hill is also so tiny that it is completely lost in the noise.
Making Money with App Engine
I'm surprised nobody has discussed the selection bias going on here. The better programmers are the ones that will stay on. IDK what the general turnover is in coding, but it makes sense that some people won't be able to hack it, appearing to boost the salaries of the "better" workers.
Well, it’s 2009.
Square is where the financial industry should be going - it offers an unambiguous service at a reasonable, flat price to all it's customers.

My one feature request - payment only logins, so people in the field could take payments into a central account, but not manage that account.
Microsoft’s BPOS password madness driving users to Google Apps
Do you like where you work? (Survey)
i charge my clients for updates once the project has gone live (once you go live, proposal was complete). i charge per hour and bill work in 15 minute increments. anything that takes longer than X (for most clients that's 2-4 hours), i give them a quote. anything less than X, i just do and then send an invoice every 2 to 4 weeks.
Sure it's easy to fake, but you are under oath. You can stand up there all day and say that, to the best of your knowledge you were not speeding and not perjure yourself. If you get up there with forged documents and get caught, that's something else entirely. So, they are not iron-clad evidence, but they should be pretty good.
SiteSupport | Remote Desktop for Web based applications
This is a bigger deal than it seems at first: until now, Square has only been competing with other card processors on simplicity. Now they're competing on price, too.
You're assuming that people carry around $100 to spend on something.

The sweet spot of Square is people who are selling things that cost more than what is in most people's pockets at any given time, and want to be able to do it from anywhere.
I get that you wanted to keep them happy, and sometimes that's the price to pay for getting initial traction and referrals.

Most reasonable people understand boundaries though. If you charge a minimum of one hour, then they are forced to batch up and prioritize their requests. This is a good thing. Right now, you are training them the wrong way!!! Keeping a customer happy is not the same as being a slave to them.

I would also suggest that there is no such thing as a 10 minute task. You have to account for your mind-shift between projects. This is why it helps to batch things up - and you can explain it like that. You can do four or five changes at one time much faster than you can do five changes over five different days.

Monthly retainers are great if you can get it. Maybe even something like 5 hours a month. Give them 6 every now again - that will make them happy.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention - you may want to discount your rate slightly for the retainer plan. This makes it mutually beneficial.
Q&A With LivingSocial CEO: His Plan For Building The Next Huge eCommerce Company
Very cool. I wish it hooked in with Outlook though. Not all companies are on Google Apps.
Thanks. I do biology with limited amount of data and my needs are very basic. Here is a software I wrote to do sleep analysis in Drosophila: http://www.pysolo.net

So far I could satisfy most of my statistics needs with the function in numpy and scipy but occasionally I need to do something slightly more fancy and R I guess is the way to go.
Well it's true that website design are better, typeface are taken into account. But was referring to a mre recent history, like maybe the last two years.

It's really about the font size and not the design. Sadly I find myself zooming more and more often just to read comfortably an article. Well, maybe it's just me :-)
No TNs?
Not quite. I think this is conventional wisdom:

If you take a risk and co-found your own startup with 0 years of experience, then even if you tank 2 years later, you are likely to wind up close to the 5 years of experience point of the hockey stick when applying for a job.

Basically, the startup gives you a small chance of huge upside, and on the downside, you become a normal W-2 salaried employee but begin at a point farther along than someone who played it safe the entire time.

Whether this happens in practice is probably highly dependent on whether the risk taker demonstrated some goodness during the failed startup.
...yet still can't come to universal agreement as to how it should be spun. :-)
Boxee or Roku? I've been wanting to buy one of them but can't decide.
Ask HN: Was anyone at Webstock affected by the earthquake in NZ?
Webstock was going on from the 14th to the 18th and there were some fairly well known speakers that get featured here on HN from time to time (like John Gruber and Marco Arment). After the earthquake in New Zealand yesterday does anyone know how those guys are doing and if everything's OK? Hopefully they made it back to their respective homes before it hit.
Safari Books Online + iPad = awesome!

(okay, there are some presentation glitches, but it works well enough)
IE doesn’t support any other format than ICO for favicons. Redirects, spoofed MIME types or fake file extensions won’t change that.
From what I remember there was only one or two "motherfuckers".

I will post up some more data if anyone is interested.
X-Class Flare Bounces Off North Pole
That article is subtly wrong. Certainly it is less wrong (pun intended) than the reasoning it criticizes, but it does subtly miss the mark.

Bayes' Law refers to data: specifically, it relates data to evidence. When a datum provides evidence for a hypothesis, the reverse of that datum must also provide evidence against that hypothesis. That is to say, a datum is either relevant or it's not. If it is relevant, then it will present evidence either for or against a given hypothesis, depending on its value.

If you don't know that datum, however, it manages to not provide evidence either way. As such, it is easy to lack evidence either for or against a hypothesis. Through straightforward logical manipulations from there, it's possible to have "absence of evidence" while not having "evidence of absence". Therefore, they cannot be equivalent.
<b>Apple is the company that has their police raid journalist's homes and confiscate all his computers because their dumbass engineer left his special phone in a bar.</b>

So,

a) if you were working on a prototype product,

b) and a dumb ass engineer of your company left it at a bar, where

c) a guy illegally took it (and even more possibly outright STOLE IT) and illegally sold the stolen prototype to a journalist

d) the journalist published an article revealing all the details of the new product (and making boat loads of cache in the process)

you would NOT have reported this to the police?!!!

(Oh, and the police takes orders from Apple now, not the D.A.? You are sure that the police wouldn't have raided the home of any journalist buying stolen prototypes worth millions of dollars if it was for any random company?)
Yeah, the pie chart doesn't quite cover it - I'd like to see both swear words per commit per language (if, say, Java has 10% of the swear words but 3% of the commits) and complexity of the swear words - a simple "Fuck" implies far less frustration than a "Motherfucking Cocksucker!"

Could develop quite a nice Programming Language Pain Index…
For the record, never heard back from you.
Note that I ripped an equal amount of commit messages per language so the results aren't based on how many projects there are per language.

I like how he had to tweak the data collection process to make the visualization method fit.
Given that there were only 210 total swear words, the accuracy of this seems pretty questionable. It's possible that one guy could be responsible for a large percentage of swearing for a given language.
My first reaction was "what's 15 cents?" But a quick calculation shows how it can really add up for a small business operator. Example, 50 transactions per day, that's $7.50 saved per day. Just weekdays alone, that adds up to $150 per month. Nothing huge, but every bit helps.
It's an amazing experience to live with others that are passionate about similar interests, especially when you're early in your career and it's impossible to burn out.
I've never had that with startups, I did live with other athletes in college though. A year with the crew guys (they got me into weights) and about two years with other soccer nuts like me. That was heaven, playing as many games a week as we could, whether pickup, organized or anything in between.
I'm an outlier in a few different ways in life, and in my 40's, I am with startups as well. I didn't discover how satisfying being an entrepreneur could be until I really started trying it in my late 30's and now I can't get enough.

I also think it's a slightly different environment for tech now than it was just 10 years ago. There seem to be more resources available for people who want to get started. But I think a stronger factor may be that these days people my age actually had the internet when they were younger, especially those of us who had technical training and internet connections in college. This isn't some new fad for me. It's life and potentially life-changing and industry disrupting if we do it right.

I guess many my age are content just writing enterprise Java code with one eye on their 401(k), but I'm much more interested in new technologies, languages and see so many possibilities out there.
If one is looking for a vacation plan, this is the worst guide to the area I have ever seen. I suppose it's useful if you're taking a job at Google, and want a realistic taste of the boring reality your life is to become. I wouldn't share this with any normal person looking to take a vacation, though... they would be rightfully pissed off.
Actually - "but then the Java phenomenon happened and we eventually had to switch to Java before ever releasing it".

http://www.strongtalk.org/history.html
About This Whole Subscription Hubbub
The first gen iPad was announced on January 27, 2010. It was available on April 3, 2010. That's 2 months between announcement and launch.

Apple could afford to release information that far in advance, because it didn't replace an existing Apple product and there was no competition from other vendors. This year, the situation is different. I'm willing to bet that the second gen iPad will be available within 5 weeks of its announcement. (If I'd have to guess, I'd say Saturday, April 2.)
Is it ok statistically to get for example all Ruby commits and 25% of C++ ones and compare them ?
Another kind of chart would be nice... also some other params.
2 Things:

I always charge 25% up front (in case they cancel halfway through, or just take forever to get started).

Once the project is done, maintenance is always hourly with a 1 hour minimum. Even if it only takes 5-10 minutes, the bill will be for an hour. As long as you are upfront about this, it will give them incentive to batch the changes into groups, and also make it so you're not taking 5 minutes out of every day to do some minor change.

There are the hidden costs that clients don't consider: Stress and time to plan to do the change, firing up the environment while stopping what you're working on, changing, testing, uploading, emailing the client to let them know it's done, doing an invoice, following up with payment, cashing the check, etc. 5 minutes of work generally takes an hour of your time overall.
Japan unearths site linked to human experiments