skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, mostly. We don't use car insurance the same way as health insurance, demanding $5 "co pays" for oil changes and tire rebalancing - you just pay for the services you need. For 'catastrophic' car stuff - body work after accidents, etc - yes, you have auto insurance to help cover those major expenses. Since we've had so many layers between medical users and providers over the decades, there's very little in the way of 'market forces' at work.

My own health (and that of my wife) isn't perfect, but it's reasonably good enough that we can afford our own private health policy, but only reasonably as a high-deductible variant of $5k or so. And... while it's not great to have to deal with large bills now and then, it's still doable.

We had $3300 in premiums last year, and $4300 in out of pocket expenses (roughly). That's $7600 - divided by 12 is $633/month. But we only had $3300 in premiums the year before - $280/month. That's the nature of insurance - we take some risk. Not everyone can do it, of course, but I have friends who are chained to jobs partially (mostly) because of employer-provided healthcare. For a family of 5, high-deductible insurance may be something like $600/month, with a potential extra $5k+ out of pocket, but that's a risk. Instead, they're usually paying more than that in premiums (either they are or the employer is sharing it), so that money's getting definitely being spent either way, instead of only potentially being spent.

What might be interesting is to get employers to start offering high-deductible plans, but putting x% extra in to a pool, then sharing a portion of that as a bonus each year to employees who don't use it, but it's there to help if employees need to access it - perhaps something like 50% of your out of pocket deductible could be paid by the company.

But... that's just really confusing over time, imo. Just make it easier for people to buy insurance in the open market - get away from employer-sponsored health insurance. We've moved away from employer-provided retirement packages - make the same move on health insurance.
Patterns for the sequence of letters in the alphabet.

2^5 for a, times 2^5 - 1 for b, etc.
What about long term? What is the effects in 10, 20 even 30 years on the ability to remember? There are many issues with this, interesting as it may be I remain sceptical.
We considered this with NewsTilt, but never got far enough along to actually try it. The aim wasn't actually A/B testing them, but to use machine learning to predict how well the article would do given certain criteria: title, what time of day it was released, etc, to allow journalists to tweak those criteria. I think that was actually PG's idea.
Just to point out, for those who have never heard of it, you can learn a lot about parsing, pattern matching, grammars, and term rewriting from TXL, which is definitely a Perlis language.

http://txl.ca

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXL_(programming_language)
Laravel.com should really be in this, one of the new hottest frameworks.
The lady doth protests too much, methinks.
I thought the following quote from the article made me think back to a rich history:

"For many Americans, modern medical advances have made death seem more like an option than an obligation."

In 1912, F. M. Cornford wrote that the Greeks had a view of fate where life was circumscribed by limits both in length and law, and and where when one stepped outside these limits, the debt of life is repaid in death.

One of the interesting elements of my study of Norse myth is that the exact same pattern shows up there (although the last time I tried to fully expound that it took me 10 pages!). The overall structure seems to be that the foundation of life is a primal lot or layer which is bound by law, and incurs a debt (Old Norse 'skuld,' the name of the third Norn means 'debt') and given back at the end of life. The idea that death repays the debt that was loaned as life is a very interesting one, and it gives a sense of an obligation not only to live well but also to die well as well.
I'll believe that when Texas executes one of them.
What do you think about (IIRC) the system in the UK where the loser pays the lawyer costs of both sides? Do you think the US could ever have this type of procedures established?

It seems to me that it would primarily have the effect of preventing sham suits like this one. The net effect being that courts could actually deal with important issues rather than dealing with suits designed primarily to harass.
Lol you're right. I hadn't read that far when I posted the comment. My bad.
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Education increases quality of life.
So does have a successful startup - it free's from the tyranny of working for someone else. So the "luxury" is really a matter of degree. Cost of startup schooling is the same as public school or state college, roughly 10,000 per year.

Already established tools were not already established when they were first implemented - the three R's. In our modern world we need to add a few more R's - computer programming, marketing/personal branding, and entrepreneurship should be a skill everyone is taught by societal funding.
>>The question is: who will be waking up?

An identical copy of you. If it is not identical then it wouldn't be you.

>>So you'd step into such a teleporter?

If the new me is identical to the old me I think I would. The new me is not supposed to notice anything different other than I woke up in a different place. The old me should never wake up once the new me has woken up.

>> consciousness/soul/identity

Being able to create an identical you assumes that you are your brain and nothing else.
This is my new favorite site. Thank you.
60 Highly Clever Minimal Logo Designs
This is exactly what I was looking for this morning! I even started getting a quote from a site that charges for this service. I'm assuming I can use the results for whatever I please?
Hacker New Bug: Can't Merge OpenIDs
This has been an issue for a while, so I'm not sure if anybody else has noticed it, and there doesn't seem to be a good way to report bugs here? :|

Anyway, when attempting to log in with my Google Account and merge it to my Hacker News acct, the system ends up hitting http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge which doesn't exist.

So, yeah.
Similar GUI functionality in OS X can be achieved with cocoaDialog:

http://mstratman.github.com/cocoadialog/

Comes in very handy, along with Platypus for wrapping shell scripts:

http://sveinbjorn.org/platypus
Node is only using one of the 8 cores in that test. It's not using express either.
(FWIW, the only two people I know who use foursquare actively compete to see who gets the most points every week.)
Google feeds Safari cookies
Anyway, I know my children's online history. I can see every word she's ever typed, every keystroke she's ever sent across her laptop, regardless of whether she was at home or at a friend's house.

If my daughter were to leave school in the middle of the day for any reason, as soon as her cell phone's GPS footprint triggered outside the normal 3 mile radius she's supposed to be in I get a text alert. (whether someone thinks they're smart enough to disable the gps or not) Then I can push a few buttons and turn on her phone's speaker, track her GPS location in real-time. I make it a point to know how to get to my child better than any police could dream of in this day and age. Nothing short of an FBI swat team find my child better than I can. I could make a call to 911 and tell the police turn-by-turn directions to where she was within about 500 feet. I can do the same with her laptop. I can remote activate the web camera, track the ISP node the laptop is closest to - within about one mile and constantly record what happens on the screen if I need to. Call me over-protective if you want, but I know what the technological capabilities of the bad people are because we use them too in our industry, though for different purposes.

Is he just bragging or are all these SOP in this line of business?
Library shuts down computer for learning to give saucy responses
Great app. I remember reading how to do this on Hackaday.com

You could offer a paid account that lets people automatically embed a QR code with custom logo on their site. This would be great for real estate and car sale sites - especially because the QR Code could be copied from page and put on the signs that use to advertise the house/car.
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Why the NFL bans iPads (and other technology)
Luxurious World
I agree with you - this article does a very poor job of communicating the advantages of 'NoSQL' databases over traditional solutions. It spends too many words setting up a straw man (SQL == not partitioned, not highly available, not redundant, etc) and too few actually making it's case.

Lines like this are, at best, a gross oversimplification of relational database performance tuning:
"But when you need to optimize performance, you look at the queries you actually perform, then merge tables to create longer rows, and do away with joins wherever possible."

And this:
"We require sub-second responses to queries."

Really? Single big-box OLTP systems have many issues, but if you are getting query times greater than a second on a typical online database then you are either doing something wrong or have specific requirements. Neither of those things will be fixed by blindly picking 'NoSQL' over 'SQL'.

"any significant database needs to be distributed."
I could easily list, off the top of my head, 100 significant databases that aren't distributed. Maybe some of them should be, but saying that "any significant database needs to be distributed" is a real stretch.

> There are many good reasons to design around a NoSQL database instead of a relational one. This article provides fewer than zero of them.

Yeah, that's the thing. An article of a quarter of the length with more research, less strawman bashing and less breathlessness could have made the case for NoSQL much more effectively.
I'm convinced you shouldn't be allowed to write production code unless you've read and understood The Pragmatic Programmer.
I wonder if this Berkeley offering has anything to do with why the other Stanford/Coursera courses have all been delayed. The most recent emails claimed the delay was for "legal/administrative issues". I wonder how Stanford feels about Coursera working with Berkeley also.
Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics
Yes, you can use the resulting image for anything with no restriction. I don't care if you take out the little qrpixel blurb or want to modify it further.

Really I am just looking to introduce a different method of encoding images in QR codes, to make 2d barcodes less ugly.
Yes, but I was trying not to jump to that conclusion as I have no particular reason to think that. It probably has more to do with the office she happened to visit, it was the same one that gave me a nonchalant "yeah, whatever" -answer before.
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Jonathan Rothberg is skeptical: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/18/who-dou...
I do print my signature on them, which is an actual scan of my signature.
Random ones?
There are a number of reasons why I did this:

1. I want to experiment with implementing an imperative language with mutable global state on top of Erlang. A goal was to do it in straight Erlang without extensions.

2. I am giving a talk on implementing DSL's on Erlang at the next Erlang Factory in San Francisco in March, http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012 (be there, it's going to be good, the whole factory I mean), and I wanted to be able to give practical experience from implementing a real-life imperative mutable data language. Lua is a nice, small, relatively clean language and is a good choice for this. And it is actually in use. I was also considering PHP or Javascript but they are definitely not small and clean.

3. Lua is an interseting language in its own right and has some cool ideas. You can get quite far with a few simple primitives. I don't know if these would be transferable to Erlang.

4. I like implementing languages.

While erlua is definitely interesting it is "just" an Erlang interface to a standard Lua system and not what I was after. I know that this idea is being used in some commercial systems so it is definitely a viable option.

Whether this is of any practical use I don't know. For doing large amounts of Lua execution then a solution like erlua is probably better as the straight lua implementation is faster than luerl can ever be; doing mutable data in an immutable environment is not free. However, the interface between Erlang and Lua in luerl is definitely faster so for smaller amounts of work it may be better. There is also the benefit of while there are many languages there is only one system running them. Could lead to easier maintenance.

This only a first version and there is much still to do. I am experimenting with different ways of implementing Lua's mutable data and I am looking at compiling the Lua code down to native Erlang machine code; the current version is an interpreter. There are also some language features left to implement. More libraries would help.

That is the status as it stands. My goal is to have a system where people could take their Lua code and just run it in luerl.
It's worth noting that the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and almost every other western democracy finance very large chunks of their governmental expenditures via high consumption taxes. Most people agree that not only are they not hellholes with the poor and middle class starving on the streets, but they're actually nicer places to be poor than the US. So while you're right that this would be a shift to a less progressive tax system, it's also clear that this isn't the whole story.

In fact, the progessivity of the tax system has very little impact on inequality. You can have a highly progressive system (like the US, which by some measures has the most progressive tax system of any first world country), or a relatively regressive system like most of Europe, and it just doesn't matter. In which case, anything to simplify the tax system in the US is probably a good idea.

Further, the "rich" in your example are able to easily evade most taxes. Consumption taxes - specifically if implemented as a VAT, as in Europe - are effectively impossible to dodge, even if you're very rich. You may not pay a lot as a percentage of your total income, but you will pay. The (nominally) highly progressive system in the US is unable to guarantee that.

(And in any case, as recursive pointed out, the prebate check would make the system arbitrarily progressive, undermining your entire complaint. Although personally, I'd favour just implementing a straight up European-style regressive VAT, and if you want to redistribute income, do it via welfare payments; that's what they're there for. And unlike tinkering with the tax code, they actually are capable of effecting significant redistribution. Your entire argument seems predicated on the idea that the US tax code has something to offer that the typical European tax code does not. Will all due respect, I question this. The US tax code is a disaster, and US prosperity has been achieved in spite of it, not because of it.)
Top 17 People Jeremy Lin SHOULD Not Be Compared to… and Why
I'm curious how this is different from just sticking the painted pixels on top of the generated QR code. Are you somehow taking in to account the values of the painted pixels when choosing values for the rest of them?
Yes, an API or some easier features to do multiple URLs may come at some point.

This is a bit different from abusing the error correction as presented elsewhere - this actually encodes the image as data (padding actually) into the QR code so you get a larger area to use for the image and the code is still robust to damage.

All readers that I have tested so far work fine with this method, however it is a tiny bit outside the official QR code spec.
This is exactly what the OP warned against. When the marketing people find out about all these "near products" you guys churned out in a day, say goodbye to sane development schedule.
Single Atom Transistor to Destroy Moore's Law
I see OP imagining himself doing some LOTR style "You Shall Not Pass" to one of these evil 'idea' types at a hacker space. Situation portrayed seems unlikely and somewhat contrived, i.e. I would hope that most hackers would be independently capable of fending off someone "...from Hollywood...".
The NYT's article has nine (9!) pages.
Are they looking for page views or what.

Forbes' article is one page.
Surprised?
No he doesn't. Most episodes he says that he has to get out on his own. If he missed his rendez-vous search and rescue teams kick into action to go out and find him.

There was one particular episode where he had to find some natives to get him out because he was dying of dehydration. He got sick and had diaharrea and no one was there to help him.
Yes, this encodes the actual image into the QR code data, with error correction intact. This allows for a larger image area and you still get the benefits of error correction.

There is a padding section between the data (roughly encoded in the right side) and the error correction (left side.) Most QR encoding methods make the padding section as small as possible to get the best printable result and smallest QR code. This makes the padding huge, thus the limit on URL length and automatic URL shortening, and uses these padding bits to encode the image.

Of course it is a bit outside the spec doing it in this way, but it has worked with every reader I've tested so far as they don't verify the padding bits.
At least in the US it's against the law to spoof a 'From' SMS address you don't have access to.
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In a sense I have the same experience as you. I regularly use little bits of the theory we studied in college, except that I only understand that theory because it was re-taught to me by more experienced programmers at my internships/jobs. Nothing I learned in college really stuck because it wasn't taught with any context or application. Computer science was part of the engineering department at my school, so I think it's reasonable for me to expect at least some understanding of how the theory relates to real-world situations.
You are flat-out wrong about Americans and their willingness to give up their time for charitable causes [1].

Interestingly I am also British and my impression from American friends and acquaintances was generally the opposite to yours: many of them had volunteered in the past or were involved with volunteering, which is something I came across less frequently in the UK (I emigrated 4 years ago so this may have changed, I suppose). This impression is borne out by the report above.

While the social issues faced in every country differ greatly for any number of reasons governed by history, demographics, etc. etc., there are enough similarities between the two countries as to make you sound very insensitive to the issues faced by many inhabitants of the UK.

To use one small example, the Gini co-efficient measure of income inequality (after taxes) for the UK is closer to that of the US than it is for almost every other European country [2]. I don't think anybody would dispute that there are a lot of poor and disadvantaged people in the UK.

The main difference between the two countries has less to do with the willingness of citizens to donate time or money to charitable causes than it does to do with the "social safety net", provided by the government. That's a whole different subject though.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/sep/08/charitab...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...
Django-uni-form end of life
anyone know of a google group for any of these classes?
Don't know if he's bragging or not but all that technology is useless. If she didn't want to be tracked or if bad guys got her that didn't want to be tracked they sure as hell wouldn't be lugging all that highly trackable technology as well.

Geez, anybody who watches TV or movie thrillers knows this by now.
Not really. I've toyed with both Common Lisp and Scheme and while I love Scheme for its simplicity and minimalism (at the core, anyway), in my mind they're both really quite different from what Clojure provides. Common Lisp seemed much too clunky and patched together to me, compared to how Clojure is designed to cleanly sit on top of its sequence abstraction, Clojure's notion of time and concurrency and even just how Clojure eliminates the need for some of the parentheses that are required in CL.

I'm sure its a matter of taste (and I actually do quite like Scheme, I guess just not enough to try and make it work for me right now...).

Having said that and ignoring Clojure, I also appreciate languages with a little more syntax sometimes, so I guess that's also held me back a bit. I should give Scheme or Common Lisp another try and see if I can't use it for my current work, but its hard to set the time aside, I guess.
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Yes, but those companies aren't called startups. They're called businesses.
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I have wondered for some time what the effect would be of the following transparency experiment:

With an experienced investigative journalist as a mentor, "deploy" a handful of young journalists to report via a blog-esque medium on the politics of some randomly chosen small city. What would happen if every police incident was investigated to find out if the powerful were granted special treatment? If every claim made in a city council meeting was verified? If every motive behind every vote was examined? How about tracing down budget expenditures to see who was scheming to defraud taxpayers? Would the city's citizens care enough to even read the blog? Would this transparency change government for the better? It certainly would give Americans a baseline for the level of corruption and inefficiency in local governments.
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk.nyud.net/blog/detect-visitor-soc...
The act of measuring would change the behavior. In this way, transparency activism suffers the same phenomenon as security: doing the job right yields an environment in which there is no apparent need for doing the job right.
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Except the drug does not "override trauma". It actually causes you to forget the memory you are recalling.

Judging by your username, I'm going to guess you are familiar with the operation of DRAM: it must periodically be refreshed by reading the data out and then writing it back in. Human memory works the same way (albeit without the requirement of continual refresh). The drug in the article interrupts the write-back process, and the memory is then lost.
Did anybody else think this article was about Facebook before clicking the link?
The survey of nosql technologies sounds more like a rationale for another O'Reilly bookshelf!

I mean, there are definitely arguments that can be made for alternatives to relational databases, but without those special cases, in such an early stage of maturation and without standards, it's worthy for pursuing by the hardy cowboy or blissful novice.

As the nosql technologies do mature and standards emerge, I think it should be expected that they will be subsumed into existing database products as new features.