skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's always interesting when an economic argument ignores either costs or benefits. While the clean air act provided benefits, that doesn't imply that we couldn't have gotten the benefits for less, let alone that every regulation in the face of claimed "market failure", or even actual externalities, is a good idea.

There are several studies showing the huge benefits of the CAA relative to its costs. Banning leaded gasoline alone was a net $16 billion/year benefit.

And no, there is no implication that we couldn't have achieved the benefits of the CAA for less. That's the reality of the world we live in. Neoclassical economics only guarantees us efficient market allocations in the face of demonstrably false assumptions about consumer behavior, transaction costs, lack of externalities, etc. The "laissez faire" touchstone is good and debunked. All we have left is empiricism. Use the tools we have to address perceived problems, then see if the benefits outweigh the costs. There will be no guarantees that you'll have chosen an efficient solution, but any regulation where the benefits outweigh the costs can be justified on its own merits.
> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale,

I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team of such, can pull in similar timeframes. Perhaps in 10x the timeframe they would producte something of similar capability, but not necessarily of matching quality.
Thanksgiving Day Giving Thanks to You
Epicenter is sending out some annoyed tweets while defending the AgileUX movement. They claim their process is nothing like waterfall as it focuses on iterative UX prototyping.

https://twitter.com/epicenternyc
Note that NaCl has shifted from the NPAPI to the Pepper API, so there actually isn't a plugin that extends support to alternative browsers. You have to use Chrome.
There is no cut dried answer in USA. Parameters to review:
* what is your (you/wife/family history) current health?
* what is your current list of medications and will they even be covered by an insurance plan you like?
* how much risk do you want to carry (less premium, higher deductible) vs the insurance plan (higher premium, lower deductible )?
* where you live. Certain regions will have higher premiums.
* family vs single.
* how close can you predict your health expenses into the future year?

Options to consider
* alumni associations, affinity groups, clubs etc. may offer health plans
* talk with an insurance broker. Yes, a real live person, as they will be knowledgeable about the current market and any issues with specific carriers and plans. They usually are free to talk with and obtain quotes from.

If you can do it, get a high deductible insurance plan with an HSA for the years in which you are not having a baby. HSA contributions get some tax deduction status and those unspent HSA dollars can be carried in to the future. My CPA says HSA contusions are a good way to save for long term future medical expenses.

For the plan year you get pregnant, aim to understand the total costs and can an HSA / high deductible plan fit your finances. Will you be comfortable taking on the out of pocket expenses (the high deductible part) and continue making contributions to the HSA?

Will/can your wife work for a company that can offer health insurance?

Getting a plan in place is something that will take 2 to 6 weeks to get ini place so don't wait too long.

Now for the bigger question: do you have disability insurance and life insurance also in place?

Fyi, COBRA will most likely be more expensive than any plan you can get at the family level.

Hope this helps:)
This wouldn't happen with (language of the month) plus (random no-SQL database). Why didn't JetBlue think about scalability in the first place.
> The difference is this one plugin is capable of covering much more ground than Unity3D alone. Once it's there, nothing stopping one from porting, say, id Tech, Unreal, Frostbite, RenderWare, OGRE, Avalanche, Crystal, CryEngine, EGO, Source, etc. to NaCl and running it in the same plugin.

That's already possible with the Flash plugin using Alchemy. There are demos of several of those game engines running in it.

It is also possible to compile those technologies to JavaScript and run them without plugins at all (using Mandreel or Emscripten), but the experience would be less uniform (results would be different in different browsers), which is probably why it hasn't been done yet.
New Accelerator Centre Graduates
Bequette earns Academic All-American honors - University of Arkansas Athletics
I dont know how/what to think about this, also I didn't mean to include any other links , so this will be my last take for today. http://croak.eu/rDCDm9
AccelerateTO: Essentials of a killer pitch
A common reason for this is extensions which break Firefox's ability to clean up RAM usage. See this bug and its dependencies https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=700547 (Firebug, LastPass, and Scriptish/Greasemonkey seem to be commonly at fault.)

If it's not an extension, it could be a "zombie compartment" and any help you can provide tracking that down would be great. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Zombie_compartments
One last item: you will have to shop each year. Was on Anthem for several years and then they raised their rates 30%, so shopped for a new plan. That worked well for two years and then that insurance company ran into financial trouble (in to receivership) so went back to Anthem at about the same price (ironic).
The company that I am referring to isn't on the Nacha list, I just checked. I found them while doing a trademark search on your domain.

When selling a name, doing a trademark search is obviously important. You don't want to pitch someone with a federal trademark registration (this company hasn't received yet they just applied) or if you do pitch you have to be very careful or you will simply alert them and give them what they need to take the name from you in many cases.

With your name though it would have simply been an extra lead but a good lead (since the UDRP risk (in my opinion based on what I see on a quick check) is low and they value the term enough to trademark.)

Also, the first thing you also need to do when someone approaches you (before replying) is to check the uspto
http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp
to see if they have a trademark or if the person inquiring can be linked to the trademark. Can't stress this enough.
Discovery/invention is one of the classic ways of differentiating (you can patent inventions but not mere discoveries of facts), but even going back hundreds of years the line gets a bit murky. For example, a ton of 19th-century patents were for chemical synthesis processes, which more or less boils down to a patent on discovering that certain reaction pathways exist and can be feasibly used with standard equipment.
Sigh, same person, argument and lack of logic as when this conversation played out here 3 days ago [1]. You continue to act like this will destroy HTML, remove it or something. This comment doesn't even make sense in a variety of ways:

>I could use Chrome from any browser

What?

>YouTube.com suddenly grew a form of DRM

How is that related to VP8? So because Google came up with a codec to (try and) avoid the patent mess surrounding h264, they're now going to use it to push DRM on Youtube? What a fantastically unsupported claim.

>returning to the 20th century ActiveX-alike requirements for login

Here you are again implying that somehow the introduction of NaCl will block us from "our data". An accusation that you completely failed to substantiate in the other discussion. Your reply there and continuation here implies that you don't understand what NaCl is [2].

>even though I could no longer write native code for Android that didn't target NaCl

So? What is the difference between writing native code that targets the Android NDK, and writing native code that runs in NaCl. (First of all, the code should be fairly similar anyway, but more importantly,) you still have to make a choice about which platform to target.

>for there was only one platform left that ran on every device.

What platform easily runs on all devices? How does NaCl remove the ability to use any others? Why does NaCl somehow prevent me from using everything in the Chrome stack except NaCl? Am I forced into it?

Again, it's just another technology to be added to the web stack. Hopefully it sees more widespread adoption. Stop your fear mongering. Especially when you couldn't even articulate good responses to the criticisms of your original paranoid blog post.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3322280

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3322521
great info thanks - you're right, there really needs to be an FAQ on this.
I wish I could grok these references :/ I didn't grow up in the US, so my musical knowledge ends with classical rock (and even that's not very deep).
Old Methods for New Drugs
But what is the actual advantage? Its all very well saying that it's easy to implement Apple's solution, but HTTP is simpler. What makes it worth having to spend a day or two on a custom solution?
A couple months back, they ran a two-page piece on the Brazilian edition of Linux Magazine, advertising their support for a language called "PHYTON".

http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/imagens/phyton_on_azure.jpg/...

Could be an acronym for Powerful Hack that Yields Things that are Outstandingly Neat. Os something like it.

Note: the agency who made the ad tried to recall the magazines, but, by the time they noticed it was way too late.
It might be a joke. It might be a serious attempt to screw you, disguised as a joke. It's like some movie character who tells you not to do something, then pushes you to do it anyway, either to teach you a lesson or because they are actually out to get you. I think it's just a joke, though.
Yeah, sorry if I came across as hostile. There have just been multiple topics/stories on this in the past few weeks. Hopefully the links I provided have the information you're looking for.
Ted's whole point is that Node.js ditches the environment of the UNIX system surrounding it, instead doing everything from scratch.
No, I would not pay for an idea.
I hope he pulls it off and if anyone can it's someone with as much credibility and talent as Louis CK.

I feel like I'm getting a bargain at $5, knowing how much enjoyment I'll get from his material. That couldn't be said for the majority of studio-supported/produced mind-numbing crap out there.
Sa-da-tay!
> This is still a plugin

The point is, by default the user does not need to install or enable it. Let's not underestimate how important a factor this is.
It's a joke people. They claim that the scraper is real though:

"Don't take it seriously

The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.

However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us."
This brings me back to 1997...
Meet Google's Biggest U.S. Search Advertisers
Well DRM helps nothing to stop a video from being torrented, so why bother with it.
I think Louis CK is smart enough to understand this, and with this personal appeal will probably sell better than using the usual methods.

I bought a copy because of this. It's nice to support the artist directly especially when the video file finally is as good as the versions you usually find only on torrent sites (no "you criminal" warnings eg. like on store bought DVD:s. Nice way to thank those that have actually paid for the content...).
> But what is the actual advantage?

Efficient high throughput performance. That's why Apple went with the protocol they did in the first place.

> What makes it worth having to spend a day or two on a custom solution?

It's not "custom", it's just a TCP connection.

I quoted a day or two as a maximum estimate, assuming someone totally unfamiliar with the space, and possible integration issues with their existing infrastructure. I'd be surprised if Urban Airship was fully integrated any faster, since most of the heavy lifting will be in managing state and creating an internal push API, not in speaking TCP+SSL to Apple.

[edit] Here's an implementation in about 20 lines of Python: http://blog.nuclearbunny.org/2009/05/11/connecting-to-apple-...
thanks! i have talked to a broker, and he pointed out several different options - all somewhat pricey unfortunately. as i expected, he viewed HSA's as a generally inferior option, thought that was a bit unclear why (i recall perhaps something to do about ease of reimbursement/coverage). not sure if that's actually true.

> If you can do it, get a high deductible insurance plan with an HSA for the years in which you are not having a baby.

this seems like a good strategy. why not just use an HSA exclusively? is it due to risk of complications/cost during pregnancy? or do pregnancy costs likely come close or exceed premiums of a traditional plan anyhow?

> Fyi, COBRA will most likely be more expensive than any plan you can get at the family level.

why is that? my wife is looking to quit soon, and is coming from a fairly large organization. and it seems like the cobra, group-negotiated rates are slightly better than the family rates i'm trying to negotiate on my own. just my own experience.
Amen. If you want a job playing basketball, you ought to watch a lot of video of great players. You ought to read a lot of books about training, techniques, and strategy. You ought to hang out with other basketball players and exchange tips. You ought to cross-train by lifting weights and running.

But all of that is secondary to playing a lot of basketball.
And that's why I'm behind a VPN. Found one torrent which I assume someone else who had this VPN's temporary IP-adress downloaded earlier, though.
Yes, I said "Chrome" instead of "Earth", but if you were so incompetent as to not understand the intent, then I shouldn't be replying at all here, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

I can see nothing but personal malcontent seeping through in this reply. Your perspective seems to be "this person is steadfast in his opinion that this is somehow wrong here, but I disagree, therefore I must accuse him of fearmongering", or something (what if instead I accuse you of "trust-mongering"?).

To reply to your previous, obviously incompletely unanswered comment: the entire purpose of the original article is to read between the lines and attempt to imagine a future where NaCl gets traction. Your original comment seems to be "this is not reality, therefore no". Simply replying by suggesting you lack imagination would have likely have caused offence (and an even more vitriolic response), so instead I chose to define the word 'conspiracy' as a hint for you instead.

The remainder of your comments are asking for science where there is none, please don't do that. If you are unwilling to comment on speculation, understanding the context under which speculation occurs, you have nothing to offer here.
proud of my fellow anonymists

Except, of course, that they didn't pay the authors for any of that high-quality content you like so much.
Ostrich penis clears up evolutionary mystery
> Hopefully this model catches on.

If the success of NiN's "Ghosts I-IV" was not sufficient, I doubt that one will be. It's a long walk, uphill, on a 10G planet, of a slope the size of Olympus Mons.
Probably missed the chance to get you useful information. But I've worked for a few companies looking to create dynamic versions of the typical "tower of infographic" visualizations. If you notice this and need some examples / general requirements to get you going, my e-mail address is on my profile.
Lamest bug we ever encountered
My favourite part was how the people appear to hate their jobs. Only in the last panel (Deployment) do you see anyone from the team smiling.
wow that's incredible. what does the company chip-in/cover per month for each person? or is that included in the $200 cost per person per month that you mentioned? how much would it cost to cover a spouse/child? i've seen some plans from empire blue cross (i don't think anthem covers NYC), and it's nowhere near that low.
Your reply on the other thread focused on a word that I even specifically said was not meant as derogatory, and you ignored all of the rest of it, much as you've done here.

I commented on your speculation. Your speculation is an absurdity without any logic as to how we get from "NaCl is available" to "NaCl is the only usable platform on the Internet", which is precisely fear-mongering.

>this person is steadfast in his opinion that this is somehow wrong here

It's fine if you would like to think that, I think you are steadfast and I'm not sure if you're wrong because I flat out don't understand how you reach your extreme conclusion. It's why I keep trying to engage in a conversation about this and understand where you're coming from. And I continue to be surprised that with the veracity of your opinion, you seem unwilling to actually talk about it more than an unsubstantiated extreme. (For example, there are probably 4 other direct replies and criticisms of your logic that you just completely ignored. As well the same thing happening in the previous thread.)

(my apologies on the Chrome/Earth thing, I assure you I wasn't intentionally being stubborn, I was legitimately confused)
Not sure about NYC, but I have been looking at starting my own business in Maryland and have been researching the situation. Here is what I found:

I can purchase my own high deductible plan at about 300 per month. This would be for me, my wife, and three children. Family deductible would be 10000. We are all healthy and I have the cash in the bank to cover a 10000 emergency. If I wanted no deductible it would cost about 1200 per month.

When purchasing insurance yourself, you may need to purchase separate maternity coverage, and you may need to wait several months after starting maternity coverage to get pregnant. Otherwise prenatal care and delivery would not be covered, although the hospital stay and baby care would be.

Not sure if New York has this, but Maryland has a special small business insurance pool. It allows small businesses to buy employee coverage cheap. If there are a few people involved this could be the way to go. Going this route would require talking to an insurance broker.

Good luck. Wish you the best of luck with the new family if you go that route. I have three children and it was the best decision ever.
Reading this I can't help but think of Joel's classic piece, Hitting the high notes. He did go into some productivity statistics collected by a prof who had, in the course of his teaching, subjected many students to identical programming tasks. But what was far, far more compelling was this part:

"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years."

And great work in software can be replicated essentially for free. That's why a great programmer can be worth so very much more to a business than an average one.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
The patent system reminds me of an airplane going down, but whenever I read statements like "Medical Patents Must Die" I remember that nobody has a solution to make it fly again. The captain might be wrong, but the first officer doesn't know how to fix it (which is a fundamental step of communicating concerns inside the cockpit - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management#Commun... ).

We don't know enough about the human body, the human genome, the diseases around us and their cure. Those things take huge amount of money to research and huge one-time payments that have no certainty at the end of the research tunnel. When a cure is found, no person alone can reimburse its cost. Abolishing patents via a blanket rule would make all medical capital fly out of the window and the only research performed would be the one in government-sponsored laboratories. If that's the solution we want to agree upon, be upfront and state it clearly, otherwise let's not destroy what works without better alternatives.
I don't know enough about how gems work, but the 'hub' script is faster when installed manually than when installed as a gem: https://gist.github.com/284823
That is simply... depressing, not to mention unwise.

The neophyte may be able to do 80% of the veteran's job, but that's the easily-replaceable 80%. If I'm hiring for a position that requires experience, I know that the last 20% is worth paying for. Someone is going to have to do that 20% and if it's not the new hire, then why are we hiring him?

Personal entanglements? I have never had any idea about the family status of anyone I've hired unless they were wearing a wedding ring. I don't need to know and I'm certainly not going to open the firm up to a lawsuit by asking. HR is the only one who will know, and HR does not get to veto what the software dev. interviewers say unless the candidate wants more $$ than the position offers. And even then, they'll come back to us and ask if we think he's worth it.

Compensation? Again, the interviewers don't care or know. And really does any company with half a brain care? If you're being hired, it's because we expect that you will make the company orders of magnitude more than we pay you. In that light, trying to push for the maximum salary in the pay band is really not a big deal. It's in the budget after all.
Right now I'm reading:

Fiction-
- Reamde (Bought it when it came out, but had to wait to start until I finished some other stuff on my list)

- The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos

Nonfiction-
- Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Volume 1) -- primarily for research, but it's fascinating.

- Dark Markets by Misha Glenny

- How to Live on Mars by robert Zubrin

- The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek

- This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

- Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier

- and Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland

Technical-
- Tangled Web (I saw someone else mention it, and it's really really good so far)

- Skiena's Algorithms book (making slower progress than I'd like).
The Danish state.

Glad to see that I get something for my high taxrate.
The death of web apps
This is the first interesting thing I've seen Microsoft do with Excel on the web. Who is using it?
I think that people who give flirting advice should be forced to include a disclaimer like lawyers or stock tippers.

For example:

I am not a playboy. I do not offer personalized dating advice, or comment on the suitability of any individual statement to potential romantic partner. Remember, poor flirting can cause total loss of social credibility and you should always consult with your conscience before flirting or beginning a romantic relationship.
Just to be clear, I think software and business model patents are ridiculous, but I think the hate the patent system gets on HN is not very constructive. Obviously it was put in place to solve some problems, but ended up causing/exacerbating other problems. My question is this, what is the better way of encouraging innovation and protecting the rights of inventors? I am not defending the current system here, I am just curious to see what people think would be a better system instead of endlessly bashing the system we have.
Similarly here in British Columbia, Canada.
Twitter 4.0 – Environment vs. Service | mcgvr