skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why people overuse the E.R. (And increase the cost of health care)
Maybe now, but just before the DS (and Wii), they weren't looking very healthy financially.
AIG is getting badly punished for this.

They are getting the loan at LIBOR + 8.5%. That's downright punitive.

LIBOR + 8.5% is not a rate at which a company with AIG's business model could survive at. AIG lends to people at around LIBOR + 4% for mortgages or LIBOR + a lower % to insure BBB to AA rated borrowers.

They'll probably have to sell off their assets in a hurry at below fair value. The longer they wait, the more pain the high interest inflict on them.
Yes - in this respect the American health care system has similarities to the unregulated capitalist financial markets, which is part of the problem.

I think that your comment splendidly proves my point.
Could Inner Zombie be Controlling your Brain?
Which company? One of the companies that already make a distribution of Linux? I'm sorry, but I don't understand whose responsibility you believe it to be to create this distribution.

As the author of the article alluded to, if it were to get made, it would probably get made by hobbyists.
Bob Dylan isn't predictable, but he still had to learn how to cross-pick and play harmonica like everyone else. It is the appearance of shabby carelessness that creates the effect the author is talking about, not lack of competence.
I don't know where you live, but if this article qualifies as classic Humanities material for you, and if you think Humanities is a synomym of crap, there must be something wrong with your education system.
Google Audio Indexing
An impressive summary on how to grow a business (assuming a nice initial outlay). Thought this was amazing from the techcrunch coverage:

"They haven’t raised much capital by recent standards - compare their $5.4 million in venture capital to competitor Spinvox’s $200 million. But the company has 420,000 (presumably) happy customers who primarily use it for one of three things: mobile productivity, hands-free communication and web services (voice I/O)."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/21/jott-leaves-beta-contin...
Out of Work on Wall Street
Is It Time To Break Up Google?
Incorrect. You get to pay taxes for this someday. The bailouts are financed with debt, not cash.

I, for one, welcome our soverign wealth fund overlords.
That's why they fudge a little bit when they report CPI and PPI data.
Why is this for the rich? I've seen that remark thrown around several times & I don't understand it.

From what I understand, this sort of a move is basically done by inflating the dollar causing anyone who has savings to lose out (the people without savings only lose if their wages don't catch up).
UpTake, the travel search engine that gets its traffic from Google, takes in $10M
Are Today’s Young Entrepreneurs Kinder & Gentler Than Their Forebearers?
I think helveticaman must have developed his own networking stack and routing architecture, not this government sponsored crap we all use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcp/ip
The Last of the Neanderthals: Eurasia was theirs alone for 200,000 years.
Google still struggling to conquer outposts
This is quite right. These "bankers" won't be running hacker startups and the main reason is not their lack of technical ability but rather the "cultural" attitude in many of them that doing anything else (besides working in big finance) is a failure and a proof they are not that smart.

Of course, there is always room for a few exceptions.
The cultural values of the respondents are measured by their responses to a question on the values parents would most like in their children.

This is not controlling for values taken as a given, as it is worded as most like. E.g., if my son excels in soccer there would be no desire on my part for increased aptitude in sports.
Startup: The Psychological Factor
I am happy to report that one element of Obama's tax plan (http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/taxes/Factsheet_Tax_Plan_FINA...) is to "eliminate capital-gains taxes for entrepreneurs and investors in small business".
Actually, they did get into DVD players, with the Japan-only Q: http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviewArt.cfm?artid=3886 and the Wii is supposedly going to add DVD capabilities (for a couple years now, though): http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/2006/10/31/japan-getting-wi...
IIUC, one reason we're in this mess is that nobody has any idea what the securities at the bottom of this house of cards are really worth; the risk models that were constructed during the inflation of the bubble have been discredited but nobody knows what to replace them with. So private banks weren't willing to hang $85B of their own capital out on the hope that they didn't get any more surprises.

The Fed doesn't know what those securities are worth, either, but they can calculate what preventing a collapse of the financial system is worth, and compared to that, $85B is chump change.
IBM Opens Social Software Research Center in Cambridge
"Resellers say MacBook Air sales aren’t as brisk as original MacBook"

And by that you take away "The air is a sales dud"???
The air is like a Ferrari. Of course you don't sell as many Ferrari's as fords. Why would that be surprising?
Wachovia Credit Card
An informative and detailed review of the Wachovia Credit Card
They hinted at the complexity of the formation of different tastes and how there are many other influences which might cause the overlaps you describe.

Mybe it is better to simply give different categorizations than spell in details how your tastes are formed which in turn might lead to changing your tastes.
Thanks for the great link. The correct link is actually http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

The graphs alone should open the eyes of any who defends the current US system.

Of course Cuba and the US are both outliers. But realistically the US should be able to get results that are much closer to other first world countries.
Thank You! I'm glad someone understands that the Macbook and the Thinkpad are both well designed and highly functional but represent distinctly different aesthetic viewpoints. I personally choose Thinkpad, but I can understand why someone might not appreciate its minimalist nature and prefer a Macbook instead.
Yes, I did. Lack of TextMate and OmniGraffle. Unfortunately, both emacs and VIm are very time expensive to configure to have the same features, working nearly the same way, as TextMate does.
A competitive free market is more likely to develop better medicine.

Well, yes & no. A free market does develop good medicine in much the same way as it develops good everything else. But what you are usually measuring something essentially different when evaluating medicine.

You could say that a free market system should produce more medicine. But (as free markets do) this is distributed unevenly among the population. that's OK when you are talking about shoes. Your free market will produce more shoes then a nationalised shoe industry. But a lot of those will end up in the closets with 20+ pairs or in the form of $500 shoes. Same with medicine.

The US is a good place to go if you want $10m surgery. But if you are measuring public health: life expectancy, infant mortality, death from preventable diseases, & such a $1 at the bottom goes a lot further then $1 at the top. The gains made from flattening the system, generally outweigh the lost effeciency.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

DH0, DH1, DH2, barely touching on DH3.
Thats impressive - given that Goldman's VAR each day must be massive in comparison...

GS made 3-4 times less this quarter than the same period last year though.
Founders at Work - now in paperback
In case any of you haven't already heard.
Sensationalist (and quite lame) title. This is an article about how a large part of our behaviour is driven by subconscious thought - nothing new there except for the title.
What a wonderful idea. Why didn't anybody think of that in the 200+ years of publishing?

Perhaps because it's specious? In the article the author mentions "Swift Boat" -- I think this is an excellent example of the problem. The Swift Boat ads were seen mainly by one party as being fallacious. To use a recent example, when candidate A says Candidate B voted for sex education for Kintergartners, Candidate B replies it was age-appropriate. Then Candidate A shows the exact wording of the bill, which calls for a discussion of the transmission vectors for HIV.

Everybody can pile on to me about how my examples suck, but you're just reinforcing the point: there is no universal truth squad that could un-tangle all of this rhetoric. That's what you, the voter are supposed to be doing. Stop looking to somebody else to do one of the few things you have a duty to do in a democracy.

Sorry for the rant. The article just struck me as a great example of the great gap between what passes as common sense and what would actually work.
Rational actors are more of an assumption then a requirement. Used in conjunction with carefully defining terms, this a powerful way that economists hermetically seal their theories.

rational = utility maximising
utility defined by consumer choice

Basically, they pay anything because it's worth anything.
Aspire Credit Card
An informative and detailed review of the Aspire Credit Card
They get it from their vast supplies of T-Bills and Bonds which cover their reserve.
Crappy MSN articles made for bored soccer moms. Keep HN pure and away from the border tabloid sources.
I have to wonder do the aesthetics of your MAC make you as a programmer more effective?
If AIG went down, do you in some way think you would find it easier to get a loan. On the contrary, I think it would be unlikely that anyone would be lending anyone anything.
Yes, but the original statement is barely "DH1" : "Classic Humanities material = a bunch of fuzzy feel good vignettes without any conclusions". Circle-logic, my friends.
How do you manage your closed beta invites?
How do you manage your closed beta invites?

Do you create an individual invite code for everyone who signs up to try your beta? Or have some codes which can be used multiple times (eg works for 10 signups)?

Are there any sites that manage the whole process of people applying for invites, sending out invites, etc? Inviteshare.com is the nearest thing I could find, but it's geared more towards exchanging invites between users.
Smoking, obesity, drug use, and general poor lifestyle also correlate highly negatively with income, and can increase infant mortality. Being a Black American correlates negatively with income, and positively with low birth weight and infant mortality (note that Black Americans have an infant mortality rate of 16/1000, vs about 7/1000 among White Americans).

With such large confounding factors, how can you draw the conclusion you seem to be implying?
Good design is prescient of an audience, yes. Often, however, good design applies widely to audiences it was never intended for.

For instance, OXO brand kitchen supplies were designed to be big and easy to handle for the arthritic. I own a lot of their supplies because they're sturdy and easy to handle. I never use it and think "Wow. I'm feeling arthritic today"

Similarly, Apple. Designing to make computing cool and succeeding wildly probably means the design will apply to a large number of unintended audiences as well. If you wear a suit and are professional, a glowing apple is still going to look better than a clunky black box.
I'd prefer to see the government take even half the amount of money and offer lots of smaller grants/loans to innovative entrepreneurs to launch our country into the next wave of growth. That's where the new jobs and economic growth will be. Give it to people creating value.
Getting Seed Funding
Last line in the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're upset about being downmodded, I'd suggest

1) Carefully re-read your comment, looking for ambiguities or excessive partisanship.

2) Look for patterns in the rest of the comments--I'd expect downmods on a "government actually handles [common scenario] pretty well" post in a thread full of mises.org and lew rockwell references; and just resolve to live with it.

3) Just wait. Sometimes there's two or three quick, reflexive downmods that can dent your self-esteem, but often your comment's opinion-o-meter will rise hours later, and leave you feeling rather silly if you added another comment just to complain about downmods.
"if x and y you must be an idiot" is just a personal attack. At least the original statement is attacking a topic, not a person - that makes it a billion times superior to your response.
Facebook Users Who Hate Change Making Facebook Developers Hate Facebook Users
Because only the rich, the people who own/control these mega-corps, are the only ones receiving gigantic funding "bailouts" from the government, meaning they don't face the fallout of their stupid mistakes. It's basically a free ticket to steal money from the American public, but only if you can afford to set up a mega-corp and let it fail while you "earn" multi-million dollar salaries every year regardless of performance...
How do you manage your closed beta invites?

I'm a luddite: I ask people to send me an email if they want to beta test, and then when I'm ready for more beta testers I go through my inbox, create accounts, and send out emails.
"eBay has been laying off all year. Only this time it is their employees and not the sellers on the platform finding themselves out of work."
When is F@W part 2 coming out?
Planet hacking?: Engineering the Earth to avoid global warming
I can't answer that, but there is apparrently a new chapter in the paperback that discusses the early history (in interview format) with Jessica Livingston.
Russian Markets Halted as Emergency Funding Fails to Halt Rout
Isn't the whole point of a company to solve its customers' problems for them??

Well, that's different. How much is the author willing to pay?
I don't think that table means what you think it means.

Table 10 on page 200 measures "attainment", which is something along the lines of (actual health improvements due to health care) / (best possible health improvements given spending level). That's a very different quantity than quality of care, which is what the original poster was talking about.

(It's actually more complicated, education levels are somehow worked in and details are described elsewhere.)

Rankings and indices are great, but it helps to know what you are actually ranking.
Are the people who own mega-corps richer then those that own regular corps? Generally speaking, stock is not owned exclusively by the super rich. The lower end of the spectrum (those that also have no savings) do not own stock. Anyway, haven't they lost most of their money already?

On top of that this isn't for the shareholders. It's to keep a financial system from collapsing. You can argue that it wouldn't have collapsed. That this makes it more likely to collapse etc. Sure.
Link should be http://www.zeldman.com/2008/09/15/a-modest-proposal/ ?
The attitude with which these companies have been conducting business would seem to indicate that this is hardly the first time we've created moral hazard.
Are people spending less time on porn because they're spending more time on Facebook? No
I just ordered F@W. Is it a good read?
All this really means is that preferences are transitive. I.e., if I prefer a puppy to a wii, and prefer a wii to cabbage, then I prefer a puppy to cabbage. That's not an unreasonable assumption.

It's an easy topology exercise to prove that if preferences are transitive, then a utility function exists (I think you may also need to assume a countable number of goods/services).
It's always weird to come across articles with pat titles ("Modest Proposal" = something outrageous, said with a straight face; viz, satire) but that doesn't fit the mold. No, I think he's actually being serious about regulating ads based on truth.

In fact, when a politician is caught in a good lie ("Read my lips", "I didn't have sexual relations with that woman...") it's golden for the enemy. There's no real incentive to keep the other guy honest.
When a tool comes out that pre-maturely analyzes a startup's value, and the office is filled with toys and distractions -- then the only thing left is to wait... wait for it... POP
New Hitchhiker's author announced
So if he's elected, and that's not what happens, will I be able to hold him accountable to this internet PDF?
I've also found the following strategies helpful:

Be less vocal. You might be right in your opinion on some matter, but, you don't always need to express it. Some things are okay to be ... less than ideal. Let people make their own mistakes (just try to contain them to less important system areas). Teach rather than debate.

When you do have a strong opinion, try to phrase your comments as less oppressive suggestions. If over time people ignore your suggestions and it's a critical system component, only then become more assertive and vocal. People hate being told what to do. But if you plant a seed, they are much more open to modifying their view in the long run, after they have digested your reasoning.

Everyone likes to do things their own way. As long a business goals are being efficiently achieved, don't mess with things. It seems better to guide people than direct them.
Seriously, make this into a free facebook app so fb users don't have to manually tag faces.. then sell your desktop app.. PROFIT!
I agree that the article is marred by the asinine "zombie" schtick and generally dumbed-down.

But if you're interested in research on unconscious mental processes, there's a lot of it here: at least 4 or 5 experiments that I hadn't seen cited before. I'm still hoping someone will write a good book about all this.
My concern is the article's conclusion geared towards a sort of dichotomy - the "me" part of the brain vs. the "zombie"/unconscious part of the brain. This seems contrived and artificial, reminiscent of the discredited "Cartesian theater" models. However, subtracting the conclusion of the article, and just taking the data at face value, is interesting. I think it is consistent with the Daniel Dennet "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, where the brain is effectively a "multi-threaded application", where sometimes thread A is "observed" (conscious) or thread B is "observed" (conscious) but A and B are both still there, whether we are aware of them or not. So basically the "zombies" in the brain are all that there is - it is a multi-threaded application, where each "thread" is a "zombie" to use that terminology. Sometimes this zombie or that interacts with the environmental stimuli to the point of "awareness" but there is no "awareness" per ce, just a lot of unaware threads running around which create the illusion of "self", etc. As far as I understand it anyway. :-)
It's a good reread as well.
No statistics are quoted, which greatly weakens the argument.

In my experience, the ER are where illegals go, knowing that they will not be charged. This can be shown because in states where illegal immigration is discouraged, the load on the ER goes down.

In addition, whenever the police pick up someone who is homeless because of drug or alcohol abuse, who is showing any signs of illness, they will take him to the ER. Since such a person is always homeless, and often sick, he will visit the ER several times in the course of a year.
That works for 10 to 20 invites, but it wouldn't be fun to scale it to 100's ;)
I don't think this is true. From what I know, even during the GameCube years, they were turning healthy profits.
I have been building savings since I was 15. I have a fair amount of money in the bank for someone my age. I WANT it hard to get a loan. I want all these other people with no savings cut out of the market for housing, for business opportunities, for education. That would leave me first in line.

Propping up the credit market is, yet again, screwing savers like me in favor of the spendthrifts.
We need more groups like this in Dallas too. It's very difficult finding people who are truly interested in consumer facing internet. Lots of talk here about reviving it as a cool place for the startup community, but not a lot of support to back it up. As is the case in NYC, there just don't seem to be a lot of cashed out entrepreneurs here in our space. Very smart people, but few who would have invested in Facebook or Youtube.

I look forward to hearing stories about people who get funded by this guy/group.
Great book, now more compact and affordable. Buy it and read it, you'll learn so much.
Can a distro really hope to do much more than this apt-get one-liner can?

Yeah, you could install an improved collection of prewired config files for everything so that all the tools are better integrated out of the box. But given that each web 2.0 app probably has a unique configuration, which requires a sysadmin to hand-edit all of those config files anyway, is it really going to save that much time? Configuration space is kind of large. The odds that the prewired configuration is a close match to the one you want may be fairly low.

And if your code doesn't need a custom configuration of servers, but is designed to run on some kind of standard server-farm-in-a-box configuration (with, at most, minor tweaks of a couple of config files), why are you even installing your own distros? Aren't there hosting companies that run farms of standardized boxes that your app can be designed to, and that will handle the provision and administration of those boxes for a monthly fee? Kind of like the Google App Engine business model? I haven't done business with such a company, but I've been presuming they exist. Isn't this how (e.g.) Engine Yard works?

The potential problem with the distro idea is that it sits between these two business models (bespoke setups by your own sysadmin on the one hand, one-stop shopping for standardized architectures, standardized server farms, and standardized sysadmins on the other). Is there much daylight between the two?
skype already has a backdoor, google it.

The problem is network effects again.
I just started it today. Great narratives from the authors. It'll make you want to pull on the job and jump into a start-up. (As if it's that easy...)
"... if America’s networks remember they are Americans first, revenue seekers second."

Unfortunately, they revenue seekers first. They are accountable to their shareholders (American or not). It's the politicians themselves that should be looking out for citizens first (not themselves or corporations). That is their job. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten that in the last couple of decades.
Should Wifi routers be required to mandate strong authentication
Do you have any idea how many such programs already exist? They all end up funding catfish farming research programs in Robert Byrd's territory. You seem a bit naive of the real function of cheap/free government money.
LiveCrunch Hits 2 Million Page Views Report
Deletionpedia: Where Wikipedia entries go to die
Assuming that people purchase Macs just as a kind of sexual signal is infantile thinking that projects your own motivations onto others. What you think people think is not the same as what they think.

I buy Macs because they help me get more shit done. End of story.
Ideally, it's time for some competitors. If Google had, say, 10% of the search ad market, their power would (mostly) be in check. However, at 70% Google has market power that should run afoul of anti-trust regulations. I don't like the idea of the government breaking up companies, but I also don't like companies creating barriers to entry and winner-take-all markets.
Quite true -- I have an advantage here that for tarsnap I don't want to have hundreds of beta testers yet, since I'm paying for all the storage people use. :-)