skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rich people have insurance policies that put the screws to the hospital to get an amazingly good deal. The make-up money comes from people who have crappy insurance policies and/or just enough money to pay.

Hospitals over-charge a lot. If you call hospital billing and negotiate a bit, you can get a much lower bill.

If you can spend the rest of your life paying off your hospital stay, you will.

Well this part, I'm OK with. I will gladly take credit on my future earning in exchange for a shot at having future earnings.
They can be, just like a computer can be. Ever tried reading on one of those for >30 minutes? Awful.
Now you've tickled my curiosity. Do please elaborate?
Banning side-effects like IO does create the need for odd contortions, but having less side-effects and little or no mutable data makes error recovery and debugging so much nicer.
It's more like $15bn inflation adjusted (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
Not only that, but that guy also linked back to the original and said it was a modification of the previous post.
Until I started listening to Podcasts regularly (before Mango you could only download podcasts with Zune through your computer) I would routinely just charge my phone with the wall adapter.

I sync with my computer every night now, but isn't a big stretch to imagine lots of people doing what I used to do.
I'll try, but I think I really need to hash this out on my blog a few times to nail it.

The problem here is that you are building a conceptual model of economics before you measure anything. It's backwards. If I buy a candy bar, am I trading an hour of my wages for food? I'm using money, but how did I get the money? Am I trading an equal amount of gold that represents the perceived valued I provided the rest of the economy? What is the real definition of the thing taking place here? I'd wager that there is no universal definition that applies to all economic transactions. It's something more like cellular automata with multiple dimensions, not a causality chain built of little blocks.

You want to measure something, and you're immediately knee-deep into abstract terms and aggregate numbers. So you come up with an abstract model for measuring aggregation before you even begin to measure anything. It's never going to work. You're never going to be able to construct a reproducible model with high fidelity like that.

So if you want to talk GDP, you can say you observed this amount of cash moving around. I'm okay with that. But if you say the economy grew or some such, it doesn't work. You are presupposing the thing you are trying to describe. Each transaction involving that measurement had it's own value and definition. You're taking an aggregate of a fudge of a bunch of smoke. At the end you get a number, sure, and you can take it and plug it in to various models and get something kinda/sorta useful. It's heuristics for mathematicians, not science (as we understand it)

If I'm actually on to something here and am not just being a crackpot, the implications could be that economics as a science can probably be only understood in a causal way by really complex computer models very carefully and rigorously constructed.
Yeah, I second this. I don't get many emails because I've taken myself off the all lists. Can't the OP do the same? No twitter notifications, no FB notifications, remove yourself from all RSS feeds that you never look at, all mailing lists. Maybe its not email's problem but a problem with your organization abilities.
[Taptitude Developer Here]
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. We too feel like XBL titles get pushed far too heavily, which turns away indies.

That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing budgets.

Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be missing an opporunity on windows phone.
closed -> negotiated
You gave a very simple example. Lets say the contract is to build widgets that frobulate. What if nobody has ever made widgets that frobulate? What if frobulating is poorly defined in the process, and what it means to frobulate changes over the course of the project? What if the government later decides they want widgets that barbulate in addition/instead?

The contractor has to swallow all the extra costs, because they were foolish enough to sign a vague/wrong contract?

I'm not asking this to suggest a particular answer, just wondering where this strategy takes us.
Triond - Submit Content
I wonder if the reason that there are so few e-readers for sale is because their use-case doesn't really change. In other words, they remain useful for much longer.

This might make people hold onto them instead of constantly upgrading to the latest version.
Seth's Blog: Two ways to buy the expensive
Maybe your wife can approach them instead of you?
Verizon selling private, secure LTE network access to businesses
The maid spends money in the first case, also. In the first case the money flows through a 25k expenditure that it doesn't flow through in the second case.
Worse, Nasa is like the state airline of a communist country.

It not only has to fly different obsolete aircraft. It has to fly it's biggest most expensive ones empty to a distant foreign country because of 'political links', it has to fly uneconomic routes to distant outposts, it can never fire anyone, it has to keep large fleets on standby for vague secret military purposes, it has to show huge losses on projects to hide military black-projects or subsidies to commercial aircraft makers.

And that's just assuming Nasa is otherwise perfectly competent and efficent.

No I'm not bitter - I jut worked on Hubble for a Nasa 'partner'.
Analysis: "Cybersecurity" bill endangers privacy rights
I would assert that learning a language for the joy of it, or for how much it expands your mind, is a much better motivation than that you hope it will get you a job. And I believe that a number of potential employers out there feel the same way.
No, the board votes are binding. But Zuck has complete control over the composition of the board, so he can pack it with whoever he wants. He can also remove members of the board at will. There is probably a limit to how much crazy shit he could pull before he would start to have trouble finding qualified people willing to serve on the board (which would probably in turn tank FB's stock price), but I don't think this comes anywhere close to that limit. It seems to me that this was a sound acquisition notwithstanding the potential conflicts of interest, and that Zuck used his authority in exactly the way that he should have to get it done with dispatch.

It will be interesting to see what happens the first time he uses his authority to do something really questionable.
Personally the worst variable name I have seen was in the line:

boolean alanIsABastard = true;

Where I am the Alan in question and this was written by someone who worked for me. :-)
I work with spreadsheets a lot
One of the fundamental difficulties of handling login with Backbone.js is that your regular site is usually served off HTTP, but you want to send credentials via HTTPS, which requires various hacks, or a full page refresh. By posting up something that doesn't handle that problem, I'm afraid that the OP is putting a newbie who isn't aware of that problem in danger since they are apt to copy this tutorial verbatim.
I humbly offer a contrary view.

It's the fashionable thing to joke about VC's making wrong investments, investments at bubble prices, not knowing what they are doing, etc. But let's face it, it's their job to make sound investments. Sure, they may not get it 100% right, or even 50% but their job is to continually improve this success metric.

It's great that companies like Kickstarter are giving average consumers the capability to fund these sorts of companies but let's not equate the consumers' endorsement of the startup as the potential for value or ability to succeed. VC's do their due diligence for a reason, they want to back successful companies. Average consumers funding on Kickstarter are not doing their due diligence, they're looking at the marketing pitch and handing over their hard earned dollars. I fear this is bad for both the startup ecosystem as well as for consumers.

There will be companies on Kickstarter that take money and fail. My prediction is that it will be higher than the startup space. So before we get caught up on buying exclusivity with this fundraising, let's do our due diligence.
You don't consider "data".length() == 4 to be short?
[Taptitude Developer Here]
I've heard of much higher eCPM (and much lower) on pubCenter.

It's a factor of many things including click through, rotation frequency, ad category, user demographics, etc.

I don't have experience with other platforms, but I've heard that pubCenter is one of the better ad networks.
The last four or five books I've read were in iBooks on my iPhone. I can't imagine that the Kindle App for iOS is a dramatically worse experience.
We already have this. Node.js.

So I'm confused as to why we need another language which is like JS but not really, that compiles to Node (which it doesn't, but the author wants to give it a shot).

Sharing server and client stuff in Node is already trivial. So are RPC's (dnode) and realtime streaming (socket.io). And for the sake of security/perf, this separation works very well.

Not to detract from the accomplishments here -- the type inference looks awesome, and I started off as a "compilers guy". But... why?
The problem is that the best, most expressive functional languages (lookin at ya Haskell) are mathematically based on this theory. If you want to use these languages, you have a choice between (a) learning the theory, and (b) not fully understanding the tool you're using. Both have significant downsides from a UI perspective.

Learn You A Haskell is a classic case of (b). As a tutorial it's completely successful, and how? It tells you that you can learn Haskell without learning PL theory. It also neglects to tell you how to debug you a Haskell (without learning PL theory). But once you type in the examples, I'm sure you can figure it out.

A lot of people are smart enough to program on top of mysterious black boxes. That is: a lot of people are smart enough to work past this UI problem. Moreover, the smartest people can learn Haskell by rote and then gradually, through intuition and experience, learn to grok the black box. This is not to say, I think, that it's not a problem.

Of course you could just learn the theory. I'd say anyone who can graduate with a math degree from an Ivy-class university can do it. Is you a member of this set? Find out by reading the Wikipedia page for Hindley-Milner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner

I'm sure there are simpler explanations of H-M (Haskell's type inference algorithm). But they're not on Wikipedia. I sent this link to a friend of mine with a PhD in astrophysics from Caltech. "Which seems easier to you?" I asked. "This, or special relativity?" You can probably imagine his response.

So, wanted: a higher-order typed functional language whose type system is easier to understand than special relativity. Or of course a proof that such a device is impossible :-)
Petition: IRS to prepare tax documents
Play/Pause VLC & Quicktime using Flutter - Gestures via Webcam (YC W12)
Here, let's do better.

Apple has something like $100bn in cash reserves. Like, cash on hand (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/19/100-bill...).

Think about that.
While it's true that the output/observable behavior is what we want out of a program, whether the internals rely on side effects, strictly speaking, isn't relevant to producing useful things for the users.

I won't deny that sometimes, a lack of side effects results in weird contortions, but there are ways around it and benefits that make up for it. Since side-effect-free functions are way easier to predict, debugging time is much shorter in FP, I find. Monads, while difficult to grok at first, are elegant ways to get around side effects in pure FP languages.

Or, just go with my personal favorite solution, use an FP language that's not pure (e.g., most Lisps). They tend to encourage side-effect-free and/or state-free programs, but do not strictly require it. This gives you the best of both (IMNSHO); 80-90% of your code is side-effect-free and easier to debug, and the side-effect code is relatively contained and straightforward (in an imperative sense).
There are other examples. Farseer[1] has been pretty open about his numbers and makes a nice side-income from it.

Sure, not iOS, but considering the size of the market this isn't really unexpected either.

Also, totally unrelated, but the development environment is ridiculously nice. It's very pleasant to work in.

[1] http://www.farseergames.com/blog/
That guy put the reference to the original far enough down that people who enjoyed the article the first time around may have had a strong enough feeling of deja vu that they stopped reading before reaching it.
To all of the above, thank you for your feedback. My plan is to try and get through the next month of term and pass the exams. I then have the whole of summer to work on things and see if I can gain some experience. I need to give my self as many 'open doors' as I can. Thanks again.
Honestly, i was happy when i first discovered google's data liberation project..http://www.dataliberation.org/. Was upset with fb a few years ago.. But nowadays i have accepted that no private company is going to have a financial incentive to give back my data. At best, there can be laws that are made, but loopholes will be found. Am moving all the stuff i care about to a vps hosted server. probably a couple more months and even email should be moved. Yay..:-)
Do you have an example? The bits that I recall are all government vs trust instead of board + government vs CEO.
The majority of the unemployed people are from the the real estate and construction sector. If you look at stats, unemployment is made of low-skilled labour and immigrants (non-EU citizens). It is very hard for these people to migrate to another EU country given their lack of skills.
> That's like having a clause in the GPL that says at any given time, the author can revoke the GPL and sell the copyright to Microsoft.

Which, unless the author has specifically assigned copyright to someone else, you can totally do. A similar situation arises with dual-licensed software. Of course, older versions of the software still 'live on' under the GPL, the author is implicitly making a fork.

This is one of the reasons the FSF wants you to assign it copyright to stuff: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright
Looks like its going to be a web app. Can not wait to try it out.
Print docs to your Android device with update to Google Cloud Print
It's even more unfortunate because about half of the XBL titles are 'meh' at best. Some are really good, some are pretty poor and pushing out far better indie games
Tore Anderson's talk on IPv6-only data centre deployments at RIPE64 (video)
> I find that many functional programmers, including Haskell programmers, seem convinced that I will completely abandon C++ if only I spent the time to understand Haskell.

With enough work, you can accomplish any task in any language. The only thing you can't do is force yourself to use something you don't like. So I commend you for giving it a try, but I certainly don't begrudge you for not liking it or using it for everything.

Programming language proselytization is one of the most obnoxious things about our industry. We love to cloak our feelings in rational language, but at the end of the day, all of the design decisions in a language are choices that have upsides and downsides. Some of these upsides are going to be valuable to a particular user or a particular problem, a lot of them are going to be irrelevant and a few will be detrimental. The factor that determines success is absolutely the individual and not the language.

Believing your language is the best must help motivate people to use it, but it is definitely an irrational belief, and not a technical fact. Advertising language differences as factual improvements when they are, at best, assumptions derived from untested principles must be doing for our industry what snake oil has done for Western medicine.
Tips For Models : Structuring your Profile on a Modeling Site
Could they know your income level? Also, U$ 500 buys a lot more in some other places (it's a week's salary for me for instance)
That article is bonkers.

Eg Marc is not a General Partner at Benchmark. He might be a Limited Partner which actually just means "investor."
An author of a GPL licenses work does own the copyright and is free to sell the copyright to anyone he chooses and even change the license. What they can't do is to revoke the GPL of past versions that are out.

For instance you can dual license your work. Have a GPL version for free or a private version which they could pay for.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

-F.A. Hayek

The author isn't claiming they know how to manage it better. He's just suggesting that their management, or philosophy of management isn't correct. (But maybe I'm giving the author too much credit!)
Priming open source startups
Why do you think there will be less incentive for speed in the discretized case? The reward for being first in line will be exactly the same.

And traders already have the option of advancing their price by a penny. The issue is that they are competing over hundredths of a penny.
I don´t think that this really belongs here... While it could be interesting, it´s essentially just blogspam trying to sell an e-book for 99 cents.
Coursera secures $16 million in VC/partnerships with five universities
I'm not a huge photo-sharer, and I certainly don't claim to be an expert on the space, so forgive my ignorance when I ask if photos is really a billion dollar beach head - a 1% of Facebook billion dollar beach head.

Did Facebook simply look at their activity, determine that 25% of their engagement is driven by photosharing, and decide that 1% of the company was more than reasonable to protect that space? Or something to that effect?
pretty cool. has a lot of potential
I agree with this. There are certainly situations where more than 40 hours of week are a necessity, but those situations should typically be temporary for the majority of employees. If you are in an organization where meeting your goals requires more than 40 hours a week, week in and week out, then I would say there's probably issues that go beyond your work ethic and personal boundaries.
Given the changes between Vista and XP particularly in the area of security, it's not certain that it was simply a matter of shipping the Vista version of Schannel to XP customers.

What evidence do you have that implementation would have been trivial?
I believe a taboo has slowly been growing among the entrepreneur community regarding selling startup businesses. I think it started with Mark Z. turning down offers from major tech players and it has continued with Dropbox turning down an acquisition from Apple.

I am not taking sides on whether entrepreneurs should sell their companies. But I think there is a problem when bringing up the subject is frowned upon on. I am unsure whether this is a problem with Hacker News' moderation system or it really is a taboo.
I'd recommend installing OpenStack's Swift component (S3 equivalent) and evaluating that as well. You can run it on one node for development purposes, you can scale it up if you want private object storage on your network, and many public clouds are offering it: Rackspace Cloud Servers, HP Cloud, AT&T, Korea Telecom, Internap etc

Wikipedia use OpenStack Swift to store their images, and have some good presentations on this.
Simple, elegant, awesome.

Have you tested it against paperclip?
How Mobile Phone Recycling benefits Your Small Business
Um, you're wrong. Most military or government aerospace development is done on cost plus contracts where if the bidding entity ends up spending more than they officially planned they'll make more profit. This isn't the way your city buys a sidewalk, but it is the way the government buy a space launch.
I guess so that it's laid out as a single app, instead of two apps in the same language that communicate.
Solarized provides a great mapping table between terminal color names and various color spaces.

Have to disagree slightly with this. Solarized is a great starting point, but, last time I checked, using the provided mapping table leads bold green, bold blue, and (most importantly) nonbold white to all become nearly-indistinguishable shades of grey. This alone damages the utility of the normally-colorized output of `ls`, as well as any tools that expect bold and nonbold versions of the same color to be roughly the same hue.

If you can stand losing Solarized's ability to swap back and forth between light and dark modes, I highly recommend tweaking it to your needs rather then relying on the default.
I think I agree with the general tone of the article, but his ordering is upside down: "data" is bad, but "data2" is worse, not better.
This ...

The huge amount of energy required to
lift mass out of Earth's gravity well.

... is a common misconception. The energy required to get to orbital altitude is only a tenth of the kinetic energy of orbital veloity. Yes, I'm just confirming your observation that the energy requirement is huge, but you're understating the problem, and propagating a misconception.
He also gave a good talk titled Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal

http://vimeo.com/4763707
Don't forget amazon has a publishing arm now with sections for multiple genres so they've gotten into the content creation game.

Also that's completely ignoring all the people self publishing quality work who don't need the trade publishers to put out ebooks.
"What if austerity measures work? Is that going to burst someone's bubble?"

Yes. The managerial class. Banksters need reckless spending in order to put more people and nations into debt servitude. If austerity works, people might (gasp) start to look to the free market for answers to economic woes, and start damming the banks and governments for their mis-management of economic matters.
Why huge dinosaurs had such tiny babies
Elon for president?
Something like that. Facebook saw that Instagram was adding users fast and dominating mobile (a weakness of Facebook's). The plurality, if not the majority, of Facebook activity revolves around photo sharing and photo interactions (photos get way more engagement than the sharing of links).

So Zuck decided to take them out of the competitive landscape now, while it could still afford to, rather than risk Systrom turning Instagram into a major social network that siphoned away significant amounts of activity from Facebook.com
With Instagram Deal, Facebook Shows Its Worth
Even there, context matters. For example, lambdas in functional languages. In that case it's generally agreed that single-letter variable names are very much preferable to descriptive ones.

For one, in the cases where lambdas are normally used, verbose naming can actually make the code harder to understand by disrupting the formatting of the code in which the lambda is embedded. Also, it creates a nice built-in code smell: If the lambda statement is complicated enough that its purpose is hard to understand without descriptive variable names, that's an indication you should be using a named procedure instead.
The Instagram/Facebook deal: 30% cash, 70% stock at 75+ billion valuation
Nobody said anything against really short names, the article argues against non-descriptive variable names, whether short or long.
What does == having your data available?