skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article http://www.economist.com/node/21524889
covers some of it.

"Health spending will rise by 5.8% each year from 2010 to the end of 2020, according to actuaries at the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In 2020 health care will account for one-fifth of America’s economy."

The article goes on to point out that surveys suggest that the Federal government will be liable for a huge amount of medical obligations... and all this will occur in the country which has the most expensive healthcare in the world.

Something has to break.
Simplify Parallel Code by Encapsulating Locks
I must say that for such a simple concept as decorator, this answer surely used up all the wireframe there ever was allocated for making examples.
There's no denying raw SICP demands a high level of mathematical maturity, since that could be assumed of all students taking 6.001 (all must master the calculus and calculus based Newtonian mechanics and E&M). But since you can't have an accredited by ABET CS program without requiring the calculus....
The specific availability zone they're talking about is eu-west-1a. Servers we have there are reported as 'running', but are unresponsive.

Other zones seem fine, but starting new servers doesn't seem to be working.
I am pretty sure the Python community is always up for better explanations!
> Has there ever been a shortage of developers willing to write new emulators?

A good usable emulator, with all the bugs and corner-cases ironed out? I've read the occasional MAME blog post or documentation about the gory details, and all I remember is a mounting sense of horror and gratitude that the MAME devs were doing the work rather than me.

There's basically only one MAME project, BTW.
> As above, the problem is corruption. We have a structure that is supposed to effectively keep the federal government almost completely incapable of doing anything besides maintaining international borders, treaties, and other boring matters like import taxes.

This isn't true at all. There was a group of founders led intellectually by Alexander Hamilton who believed in a strong central government and who saw the federal Constitution as giving that government very broad powers.

This is in opposition to the Jeffersonian view of limited government, the primacy of the states, the ideal of the yeoman farmer, etc.

> Because the people in power like power, and because the populace is complacent enough to allow it, they ignore any structural inconveniences like the fact that a strict reading of the Constitution forbids almost all federal programs and activities that exist today.

This also isn't true. Setting aside whether the Constitution forbids, say, the Department of Education or whatever, we have the government we have because that's what people have voted for. FDR was elected president 4 times. The New Deal was popular at the time. He wasn't cramming it down the throats of a credulous population.

It's a good thing that the Constitution is malleable enough to continue to support the wishes of a majority of Americans. If it isn't, we can either amended it so that it does (which we have done when needed), or, in an extreme case, replace it completely.

The Constitution exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
The Fallacy of Quantifying the New
I'd like to provoke a little discussion over the whole idea of being able to spot innovation by asking a set of questions. That it is a fallacy to attempt to describe the new in terms of the old. I'd love to hear other people's ideas and will happily amend the article with what I learn from the discussion.
Much of the shopping experience could be replicated online if people used large enough photos. The postage stamp sized photos that many sites use are really stupid. So if you're building an online shopping site give me big juicy full screen photos.
To Boost the Economy, Help the Self-Employed
Gxg是什么牌子
Our tax burdens are not the lowest by any means. My total tax rate partially due to living in California (although it is mostly Federal) is ~40%. There are plenty of countries in Europe that would be happy to tax me less.

My buddy in Singapore pays about 8% all told and he's in the same income range.

The temptation to become an expat gets stronger as I earn more money.

My sin is not being a fat cat living off capital gains. I have to actually earn my income, so I get fucked.
At Trafficspaces, we include a coupon code called LUCKYDAY right there on the payment page of all our plans. Saves the Google search and increase conversion rates to over 30%.

http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/
Availability zones are different for different accounts, so for me it's eu-west-1b. You can log into the console and under the EC2 tab it will show you the status of each of your availability zones.
Coughing with asthma
"my SQL cleaner"

Warning bells. Correct practice is to use PDO or MDB2 and prepared statements for SQL access. You should never need a "SQL cleaner".
Also see

The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)

Knuth coded the whole Algol compiler in three months, on a computer on which other programmers and a payroll processing had higher priority and received for that money that a top programmer earned for a year at that time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567
Infinite borrowing and defaulting are consequentially the same. I'm absolutely amazed that people believe otherwise.
Not so relevant, but as regards the huge amounts we can't reach: there is really. There's huge amounts of all sorts in the Mantle & Core, we just probably can't get there with current technology - or economically in the medium-term.
Ah, good to know, thanks for the pointer.

Another update on the status page, btw. It appears to be a power failure.
"The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated" - Okay, I took some liberty with the quote.

I see people lamenting that their favorite low-level programming techniques aren't being taught these days.

That's because the field has expanded so much! Entry-level programmers learn entry-level things. If they're good programmers, they're going to eventually teach these things to themselves... If they need them. Chances are they won't need them, though.

There are still plenty of programmers doing low-level work, and there's more all the time. There's just so many more high-level programmers that you don't notice them.
Excellent article, it's going to take me a while to digest all of it, but analysing the success of Minecraft is a worthy goal. We can all learn from Minecraft and Twitter (and Apple!) just how much is gained by constraint and simplicity.
It sounds like maybe you haven't been to Defcon. This article wasn't much better than an article about burning man would be if someone wrote one that focused on the fact that it was in the desert and didn't bother mentioning anything about the artwork or the other things that happen when a community of interesting people spend time together.

Defcon isn't about being scared. It's about blood drives, teaching anyone interested how to solder and I think this year it was about the new Defcon kids event that included a 10 year old speaker teaching others about her game hacking techniques. Defcon makes me feel better about the world most years.
The good

GitHub uses custom MIME types for all of their responses. They're using the vendor extensions that I talked about in my post, too. For example:

application/vnd.github-issue.text+json

Super cool.

Hmm, I wouldn't call that "good." It's definitively better than sending 'application/json' or 'application/xml', which tell us nothing about the structure of the data, and it's probably inevitable in their context, but "good" would be to use an actual standard mimetype instead.

The problem with using mimetypes tied to the service is that it undermines the concept of Uniform Interface, by forcing developers to write clients specifically for that service. Imagine if instead of standardizing on (X)HTML, CSS, JS and a couple of image formats, each website used their own format.
I might've let it alone if the Firefox AutoPager extension had worked on it, but no.

I fucking hate that linkbait shit.
android would have happened with or without torvalds's continuing presence beyond 2006. that's the point the writer was trying to make.
Thousands of Verizon workers up and down east coast go on strike
What was that economic theory that most of the colonial empires were run on, where the prime directive was that more gold needed to be flowing into the country than flowing out? It was later abandoned, but I don't recall exactly why. That might be an interesting parallel to your observations.
No investor likes risks, and you can't do anything to change it
I see. What I imagined is like a one-click website that would throw it on top of an existing website, but that's just a suggestion. Tweakable parameters (or some way of discovering the grid of the website) would be cool, too.
We only have the new 27"'s at work. We're almost exclusively a mac shop, so sticking with just one configuration works really well with these displays.

It doesn't matter where you're sitting. Just plug in power and the display port wherever you go and that's it! I don't have to bring more than a FedEx letter-sized envelope to work every day (it conceals my macbook air).

I can't compare it to dual lcd monitors, but as other people have mentioned I find it perfect for full screen vi or tmux sessions with a lots of splits, and wouldn't want to go back to a smaller form factor. :-)
DjangoPatterns.com: New site for discussion of common problems/solutions
Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders—Even Computers
Yes they can.. unless an angry mob whose life savings they just stole does not overthrow them. There are limits on how much you can do this and stay in power, they don't figure in the economics calculations but they do exist in real life.
Ask HN:Should I get the new Macbook Air to replace my 3yr old MBP?
I've been thinking about seriously replacing my old machine which predates the unibody MBP. I've been hearing rave reviews about the new MBAs but mostly from non-developer/designers. I'm sure it's great for email and documents, but how does it stack up when you are running local dev environments, IDEs, Photoshop etc.

Would love your feedback, especially developers and designers who made the jump.

FYI, I probably wouldn't have any other machine.

Thanks
The Onion Tests a Paywall (No, seriously)
Given that the userbase of personal computing devices (not necessarily PCs or laptops) is still growing and will be for a while, the point at which Microsoft offers an operating system that isn't the "best selling version ever" will be a disaster for the company.

Truth is: it's very difficult to buy large classes of equipment without buying Windows due to OEM relationships, same as it's ever been. I've got Win7 that came with my current Thinkpad, but I've booted it maybe two or three times, getting as far as logging in. Otherwise it's strictly been Debian. Haven't even bothered setting up Win7 under VirtualBox yet.

I don't know that Ballmer's been a disaster for Microsoft, or if it's just running down the Christensen "innovator's dilemma" curve, but the company's best days are behind it.

In ten years I see it as a legacy provider of business servers to late-adopting companies, ossified industrial giants, some government sectors, and, principally, gaming and entertainment. Possibly merged with Sony.
It should be noted that both Stanford and MIT have seen a major recent increase in CS enrollment, MIT in the last academic year, Stanford a bit earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442274. (CMU caps their annual enrollment at 135 students so isn't useful here ... but interestingly enough, contrary to the others in the top 4 they're moving even more towards instead of away from functional programming...).
I've tried to create a machine in another zone with no success. I suppose there's a lot of people doing the same :(
Well, they were in a big town and were told by the county council that there were no charge points remotely nearby. Whatever you think of Top Gear, that fact does not reflect well on electric cars.
This reminds me of the drive-through "pay-it-forward" chains that spontaneously appear from time to time:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004084452_w...
Demo or Die (About the demo scene ~ 1995)
Day 7–Trace flag 2528 disable parallelism in maintenance DBCC - SQL-Articles
Singapore's not quite the oasis you make it out to be. Have a look at how much it will cost you for a car once you get over there.
Yes, but that is yet another good reason not to version.
Garbage-First Garbage Collection: New in JDK 7
Also apparently Brendan Eich, since he included the feature in the language, continues to speak of it without shame and has used it on his blog as an example of what he'd like to see code look like (with the comment that "JSLint can suck it").
Israel Stock Market Plunges by 7%.  Trading suspended
This discussion is explicitly about javascript. How javascript benefits from including or excluding semicolons.
I've been there, thanks for assuming, and I also know how much a car costs.

You don't need a car there, it's a petty way to show off. Taxis are absurdly cheap in Singapore. gothere.sg is a great site for getting places too.
Yep. I think Tesco and Ocado both use the Redlaser barcode scanning sdk in thier IOS apps http://redlaser.com/sdk/
I've seen their review of the Leaf. Clarkson was anticipating the car running out and talking about it while looking at the dial, which he pointed out. What made it "unexpected" in the program, as this article claims, must have been lost on me. There was a point to be made and they let the car run out to make it, again, to me that was obvious. The points made were valid:

* The infrastructure to recharge this thing in the middle of a trip is not there.

* You better be prepared to wait a good number of hours to charge it.

* You better know how far you're going and note how much charge you have left before you head out.

* You will have to replace the batteries after some number of years and it will cost a lot of money.

* Electricity is the future, but these cars are not it. (Yes, they actually said that.)

Which one of these points is all of a sudden not valid?

I'm sorry, the review was spot on.
The US health care system is clearly on an unsustainable path. But the reason is that it's grotesquely inefficient compared to other health care systems. Some European health care systems cover everyone for less than half the share of GDP. So cutting costs is definitely necessary. Cutting services is not.
Mark Cuban's Suggestion on Patent Law
I was talking about the trademark, not the syrup.
If this were a feature of "human nature," though, surely it would be a constant throughout history. Maybe the main point of the linked article is that this isn't so - credit has been a part of many different human societies, but hasn't led to the particular problems we currently face.
I run a site that monitors over 100 different cloud services. Our monitoring node in EC2 EU West went down at 10:48:51 PDT. Our monitored application with PHP PaaS cloudControl, also hosted in EC2 EU West, went down at the same time. For the past year, we've gotten 99.978% availability in this EC2 region: http://cloudharmony.com/status
Yeah, but how well is the rest of SICP transmitted in a course using Java (6.005, at least according to the original plan)? Based on what I've seen (at a distance nowadays), MIT decided fundamentally change what it means to get an EECS education and degree in a panic move when enrollment dropped by half after being steady for decades.
I have to buy a new piece of furniture this month. There's no way it will fit in a sedan. Does that mean I need to buy a light truck, or is there another solution?
If you get value from all those countries, then why not? Nobody is forcing you to get patent in each and every one of those country, just like you don't have to right now, either.
Vendor mimetypes are bad. They defeat the purpose of REST.

I should be able to request from Github the content-type(s) I am willing to accept, and Github serves them to me.

It's ironic that a blog post about people understanding REST highlights their misunderstanding of it.

What Github does isn't bad, but you shouldn't praise it for being RESTful.
I like how they respect their competition, unlike in the software world where everybody is throwing rotten eggs at everybody.
You should use the reply button.
that would be a definite yes from me.
Google is so screwed.
To me, it raises this other fundamental question: if, in a case so high-profile such as rating the US debt, S&P and their best experts make a $2T mistake, then how much trust can we put in the financial rating industry at a whole?
Inspiration to overcome my current entrepreneurial obstacles and doubts
We're arguing about the design choice of requiring real names. How does that design choice not support my use case over yours?

Profile pictures are obviously sufficient as a social norm. Some people don't follow it and that's fine; though it makes them harder to find, they can also turn on the explicit "you can't find me" feature).

If I know you in real life, I know you by your real name, not your reddit handle.

G+ is obviously intended to he a better Facebook.

I'm not really sure how to make my points more clear. If you'd like, I will sportingly let you have the last word.
Google+ Pages for Businesses
There's no money on the card? http://jonathanstark.com/card/api/latest
It is based on his interviews as mentioned in the sources.
thanks, nice!
For definitions of "we" that exclude "me" perhaps.
Whenever I go through a toll bridge, I frequently pay the toll of the person behind me. I've sometimes wondered if it propagates backward at all. For the Starbucks card, I would love to live in a society where this could work. Unfortunately it's one of those things where one anonymous bad egg will ruin (i.e., drain the account) for everyone else. Some way to restrict it to a community with less anonymity would help (i.e., go to a web site, auth through hacker news, and then you get the image -- then it is tied to your HN identity).
Yes but HTML/CSS are general purpose formats. What can be standardized between the wide variety of web APIs out there?
> ... and I posit it has little to do with "presenting the facts" (where is their outrage about the claim that the stig can blink horizontally or is non-human?)

Just, wow. How does one even reply to a comment so profoundly stupid?
I'm a demoscener, and I disagree on the basis that the comparison simply doesn't make sense. Take your average scener and tell them to build a simple web application that works well and you'll see that the skill sets simply could not be more different. Am I able to make a webapp, sure; am I remotely good at it, not at all.

Now, there's something to be said about the flexibility that sceners tend to have, but I think the standard you-wear-every-hat approach of a small startup shows the same sort of flexibility. They're just two vastly different worlds.
this is completely amazing and a great proof of concept -- there is so much that could be built on top of this
Yep. Sorry about that.
The Universe Is Stingy And Lazy
If you don't need the 8gb of ram then yes. If you do then no. My old MBA was the c2d with maxed out specs and I used that as my workstation with win7 vm, visual studio, xcode, eclipse and monodevelop concurrently. The beefier CPU would make it more than adequate except I want the extra ram to run multiple virtual machines.
This piece from 100 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493319 has a lot of endorsements for the MBA as a primary work machine. I'd assume it has only gotten better since the latest upgrade.
This is the first MacBook Air with the performance a developer or graphics designer needs.

It's actually even faster than a 2010 MBP.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/20/macbook-air-2011-benchmarks/
I envision this could work as a newsletter in a similar mold to thesixtyone.com; indie artists (and eventually labels as you say) would want to give out their music for free, in hopes of converting into paid downloads.

If this were free you could gain wider user adoption, and thus, supply of music.

Let me ask; who do you want your customer to be? Listeners or artists?
Sell Annuity Payment
Not sure why you couldn't set up a trial version using in app purchases and a server that records device ID and trial dates.

Seems like all the parts are already there and it would not be difficult to implement.

You rely on a server for trial functionality, but in the end you have much more control of the system...
I sometimes park in the Yerba Buena garage, which has eight floors and 2,585 spaces. At 5.2 kW each, it should be quite an engineering challenge to add thirteen megawatts of daytime capacity in the fully-built heart of San Francisco (for scale, that's over 1% of the entire city's peak demand concentrated into one block). If power were cheaper, maybe they could smelt aluminum at night to offset the construction costs.
As long as our political system continues to be run on professional politicians who pander to their base in order to keep their jobs we will never fix anything.

Anyone who runs a household, a business, or both, clearly understands that sometimes you have to make decision that are painful in order to survive and grow.

Our elected officials know that the masses would boot them if they make the right decisions for the nation. Our political system isn't about making the right decisions for the NATION, they are about politicians making the right decisions for POLITICIANS and POLITICAL parties.

Imagine this if you will: In the recent budget debates politicians actually expressed concern about what they did in view of next year's elections. Really? What does that tell you?

Fix that problem and our country will flourish. Do not fix it and you will continue to enjoy a front seat to the spectacle that is the destruction of the US from the inside.

Whether you lean liberal or conservative, the truth is that if we don't change you can kiss all you hold dear goodbye because we are only headed in one direction...an it ain't up. Your politicians are too busy trying to get re-elected to actually do what they are supposed to be doing.

If you started over, blank slate, how would you structure government and taxation so that they would produce the right results for the country?

Some key questions apply here:

1- What is the role of government?
2- How much of our lives should government control?
3- What is the purpose of taxation?
4- Should this be a country where the government protects people and companies from failure?
5- If charities and religious organizations operate tax free, shouldn't they be tasked with helping those in need rather than doing it through government programs?
6- The world is complicated. Shouldn't those who aspire to hold office (at various levels) demonstrate competency in the required fields of study much like anyone else applying for a job?
7- How can we stop voting because we like someone, or they speak well, or they look good on TV? All of which are far from qualifying anyone to hold office.

Of course, there are dozens of questions one could ask on this subject.
A while ago I was toying with the idea of making a BitCoin<->SBUX automated exchanger for fun, since card transactions are free and could be automated relatively easily. Never did get around to it. Also, there's a rather large scammy underside to BitCoin that would probably arbitrage the hell out of it.
Some parts of the ODF like tables and equations can be very complex to be converted to HTML and even impossible in some cases unless it's displayed as svg or something similar. Handling the image conversions might also be impossible with javascript.