skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting to contrast the different approaches taken by Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin with regards to information about health issues. Sergey seemed to be trying to open/crowd source his (potential) problems where as Steve has taken the closed/inhouse source approach for as long as possible.

I can understand his position though and hope he makes a full recovery. But can't help thinking that if he released more details, an army of both qualified and unqualified Mac fans would have spent countless hours researching the problem and possibly come up with a solution sooner.
Doubtful it was the London Times, and probably entirely apocryphal: http://www.antarctic-circle.org/advert.htm
I hope everyone is happy now and can get over it. It's sad he had to come to this.

Why is it your business to know about every detail of his personal life? And don't give me this 'I'm a stockholder, I deserve to know' BS. Apple isn't going to magically fail overnight.

3%+ shift in Apple stock since this press release hit. 100% decline in Steve's dignity.

My thoughts and wishes are with Steve and his family.
I have also commented..
Again: that's not what the words "ponzi scheme" means. You could be arguing that "if benefits exceed contributions, you have a budget deficit", but that wouldn't be as emotionally manipulative, and it would also be boring.

Social Security taxes as a percentage of income were raised sharply in the '80s precisely because the baby boomers hadn't retired.
The 'nuts and bolts' of running a small software company based on the experiences of a UK-based microISV: accountants, banking, tax etc.
Why can't we let people live with their decisions? Obviously those who opt out have better things to do with their money @ least from thier pov?
Send your questions to: ask_the_explainer@yahoo.com and Slate'll get one of their assistants on it ASAP.
Actually nothing keep Colektivo from lending to foreign companies, but it's another thing to accept foreign investors.
I am glad that Steve remains in pretty good health. Thank goodness. I'm a little disgusted at how all this concern about the quality of Apple gadgets and the price of Apple stock trumps simple human concern for a fellow human being.
It sounds pretty vague to me. For being a press release about his health, it doesn't really say much. (Not that it should reveal everything, but horomone imbalance is vague.)
Because pooling risk and providing a baseline standard of living helps everyone, not just the direct beneficiaries of entitlements; for instance, current entrepreneurs aren't paralyzed in steady corporate jobs out of fear that they will need to supplement their parents income to prevent them from eating cat food.

Again: of course it is true that skilled investors can net a better return on their FICA dollars than Social Security can. Social Security isn't an investment program.
a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting.

apple's refusal to follow trends comes right from the top. yes, it can be construed as arrogant that jobs hasn't commented on his health before now. but that's his way. this methodology has downsides, but it keeps the company from slogging it out in the sewers with all the other commodity manufacturers.

this announcement is a reaction to outside pressure, which is the opposite of what makes apple great.
Does anyone know how to express progressive aspects in E-Prime?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_aspect#English
There is no such thing as a social security trust fund. The government uses that money to fund other programs and puts IOUs in there; that means when more are receiving than contributing there will be a massive tax burden on those contributing they get hit with both their normal SS tax, plus the taxes to cover the shortfall.
A book for teeny, tiny entrepeneurs?
You know, I think I would place more faith in a team of highly-trained and paid doctors who are intimately familiar with his situation and medical record than I would in "the crowd". Especially considering the fact that doctors keep all the embarassing little details confidential (and let's face it, being in ill-health is embarassing to most, and especially someone who takes such pride in being "a force of nature" like Jobs does).
Jobs doesn't have typical pancreatic cancer, or he'd almost certainly be dead by now. He has a carcinoid, some of which do pump out hormones that can cause effects like weight loss (and nausea, diarrhea, etc.). These symptoms are treatable.

My father in law has a variety of this. He lost something like 70-80 pounds before they got it under control, but has been doing well for years now.
I thought the problem was that XML was too rigid and often blows up on the user's face.

For different problems, use different tools, I guess.
I find EC2 to be a bit pricey for webapps if thats what we're going for here. It seems to be optimized for high performance and high availability compute clusters, not for persistent webapps. A traditional VPS (like Slicehost) is a more economical solution for that, IMHO.
You could always look for an abandoned website in a similar sector to yours, that has traffic. Then buy it.
There's some great bargains to be had out there.

The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.

A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.
I don't believe Steve's dignity has been diminished one jot. I'm saddened that you think less of him.

Or are you saying that that you don't think less of him, but believe that everyone else will view him has having less dignity.
Interesting news. I really liked FreeBSD in the past, but rather lost sight of it in the last few years, primarily because of the excellence of Debian and Ubuntu. This is my excuse to give it another go as a server OS. :)
There's a project called Hedgehog Lisp that's been used "in the wild" for embedded sensor systems. It's bytecoded, but the interpreter gets down to 20kb. It's not CL; it's got its own set of special forms and predefined functions, but it's a real Lisp:

http://hedgehog.oliotalo.fi/
Good point: there should be interest.
Hmm, I'd like to see how people's use of iPods & other music players correlates to being in the city. It really helps reduce the amount of background data you have to process.
"a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting."

They did exactly this a year before Jobs came back. In spite of Jobs's claims to the otherwise, the experiment did not last long enough to indicate whether it would have been viable in the long term. What is clear is that the clone makers where releasing computers more expandable and powerful than what Apple actually had on the market.
If there's no such thing as a social security trust fund --- in which case, Reagan and Greenspan's baby boomer FICA tax hike was a huge scam --- then there's no social security crisis. There's just a general budget issue. But in the general budget, Social Security is dwarfed both by other entitlement programs and by a host of other programs.

If you don't believe in the Social Security trust fund, then we should be discussing Medicare. Or out-of-control defense spending. Social Security is irrelevant.
As soon as someone started trying to charge for email, a new email system would arise. Who would you be paying?
The problem is not with the borrowing; the problem is that Social Security's asset base consists of the government's ability to borrow money. It is usually a really bad sign when someone says "I totally can't pay off this loan, but I know this guy who is willing to lend me more money because he has no idea how financially irresponsible I am."
Please launch iTunes and Firefox unless Safari is installed.

That's why non-syntactic programming doesn't work. It isn't ambiguous to you because you're human and realize that both Firefox and Safari are web browsers and why would someone not want to launch iTunes if Safari was installed. However, it can be interpreted both ways without such knowledge.

The problem isn't syntax. The problem is the logic computers need. We're loose with our language logic. We use modifiers that could modify a host of things that we only glean from what would be natural based on the content. Computers can't understand content in that way.
I don't think less of him. I am just saddened that it has had to come to this. Others have already said they think less of him because of this (in this thread alone).

The call for him to do this came from above him. Not from a single person above him, but the thousands of Apple fans and stockholders demanding this information. I think anyone who demanded to know every piece of Steve's life should feel ashamed for forcing a good man into this situation.
The life insurance aspect of SS is always overlooked in discussions on its impending collapse. I would guess that it's just not a significant factor. The yearly Social Security/Medicare payments for the average American is something like $7,500. Term Life would be what, $600?

I'm not sure what you meant after that. Actuarial tables take life spans into account. And people are not living longer, see my original comment. That's a myth, and not the problem at all.
Just like the interest you earn on your health insurance?
The last line sounded like he was pretty peeved.
Also, he's a vegan which could complicate his nutritional problems.
"The central government has blocked access to many Web sites it considers subversive or too political, including The New York Times' Web site on Dec. 19. It was unblocked a couple days later and remained open Monday."

I wonder how many political sites will be swept up in the campaign against Internet pornography?
The best paper airplane in the world
Not peeved, just disappointed in others :)
What about a web of associations--like a tag cloud on steroids--for each word and grammar construct that act like priors in a bayesian process that modifies the meaning of each atom based on context? It probably wouldn't be more than a few orders of magnitude harder than making a translate.google.com that's as good as the average bilingual.
No, the problem is with the borrowing. When our nation borrows that much, everyone's asset base consists of the government's further ability to get money (by borrowing, printing, etc.). That's the way free floating currency works. Having to print $4 trillion to put the money back in Social Security is the same to every American as having to print $4 trillion to give to China.
If Steve Jobs died tomorrow, Apple's stock would fall a gigantic amount and anyone who owns it would be totally screwed, at least in the short term. It is in Steve's best interest to at least give people a small idea of what is going on with him, so they can gauge risk. I personally think that's a sacrifice a person has to make to be a CEO.
Skilled investors? You'd get a better return from the CD at your bank.
Understanding isn't the issue for me. I have a solid math background, so I'm understanding things about as fast as I can read them. My main issue is the terminology, there is just lots of it.

A more traditional programming example is this; if you learn Java you need to understand, but learning the libraries is more a matter of remembering than understanding.

Some subjects are broad, not simply deep. Speed reading (or whatever) could help with the breadth.
Thanks. Please email me if you have questions about Smacklet. I'll add more features like graphs etc if it gets many users :)
I really don't get this one either. Anyone else get the impression that what people are really in love with is the Cinderella Story: that you can run a business on one feature executed well?
Arrington has written about Hacker News before, and Hacker News isn't in the list.
And if he disclosed that he was dying to the public, that would help the stock?

When Steve dies Apple's stock is going to drop no matter what and it may not recover. Whether this info is given out months before or immediately after it makes no difference.

Slow and painful or quick and painful, take your pick.
I'm glad that Steve gets "sophisticated" blood tests, I wouldn't want him having those simple ones.
>Why is it your business to know about every detail of his personal life?

It's not, but people are rather reasonably concerned given the typical survival rates of pancreatic cancer.
Famous Awk One-Liners Explained, Part III
Which, in a roundabout way, ends up looking curiously similar to Forth... :)
Installing a solar panel in a college dorm
Integrating Yahoo BOSS Search in a Django site in 5 easy steps - Peter Krantz
My parents got really pissed when I ran up a $250+ bill on CompuServe, dialing in on my C-64's MiteyMo 300 baud modem.

Now that was an experience - most people can type faster than 300 baud!
Conceded. I think my point still stands, though.
You'd like to know, but what makes you entitled to it?
Sounds like a job for Myth Busters.
I can read fast when I want to - easily upwards of 1000 wpm, but the main focus IMHO must be to just read (without trying to comprehend), and then trust your unconscious mind to absorb the information. The biggest problem I see with people speed reading is that they always link reading with immediate comprehension and understanding, rather than making it two independent processes. This leads to re-reading and trying to make more sense of the words by going back to them rather than acquiring more information in order to see the big picture.

Especially when I'm trying to cover a new field (right now, dsp and speech recognition) I just follow a scorched earth reading process where I read a few dozen papers and articles. In the beginning none of it makes sense, but a day/week/month later things just click, and the whole thing makes sense.
Basing a relationship on fear doesn't seem like the way to go to me.
The more Jobs says in public about his health --- even vaguely --- the more trouble Apple gets in as a corporation if they're caught dissembling about it. The fact that Jobs wrote anything at all about his health is an indicator that he doesn't believe he's in trouble.
flagged, dupe
If he had typical pancreatic cancer he'd be long dead.
I find that as soon as I find out something interesting about the person I've just met that the odds of long-term recall improve dramatically.

Context is everything when it comes to recall. I find it takes me at least 5 seconds to remember a remote office co-worker's name if they are visiting our office - by that time, they've already walked past me.

I was in another city at an event and thought I saw someone I knew from my home city. I thought 'what the heck would he be doing here? it can't be him' Later on, I emailed him and he was like 'yeah, i thought it was you. i was there too'
I am planning to go to proto.in as well.
On the second point, that baseline is going to drop much, much lower unless they drastically raise taxes. We have what, 8 years until we start taking out more than is going in.

On the third note, agreed. Medicare/Medicaid have massive problems. That doesn't mean that SS doesn't have problems too. They do have issues with workers taking more out than putting in. The birth rate continues to decline.

On the small payments thing, that maximum SS benefit is what, $1,000 monthly? That is NOT enough to live on. Especially not when you consider the cost of nursing homes, medicine, and all the other costs of living when you are partially or wholly unable to take care of yourself.

I don't know about you but I burn $1,000 just on rent, utilities, transportation and food a month. The fact that so many people put so much of their income in it just shows how misled they've been. That's a scary prospect.

If you make $50k annually averaged out from 15-65 you've put in $300,000 into SS. That's a fairly average income, well within middle-class. If you live until 90 you have pulled out everything you've taken in. If you die sooner, that money is just gone. Most people don't live until 90. Now, combine that with the fact that right now it's 3.5 people supporting one person and it starts to look like a Ponzi scheme.

http://seniorjournal.com/SocialSecurityQ-A.htm
Sokay. You're being nicer than I am at this point.
I work my goals in a variety of ways:

* very specific ones (e.g. x number of dollars of biz a month, 25-45 min exercise a day, doing y things for friends every week)

* semi-specific ones (my big thing for 2009 is to be self-sustaining with my web service/products by 2010, & to get healthy because I'm turning - gulp - 25 this year)

* really generic ones -- I used to write goals down as kind of an affirmation exercise. Not "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" kinda crap (retch), but "I am a recognized authority, speak at cool conferences, and people laugh at my jokes." kinda thing.

On the latter, they sound totally frou frou Stuart Smiley, but there really is something to stating something out loud / on paper. Not that you have to stare in the mirror and say it every day. But the act of writing it down and thinking about it seems to prime one to recognize opportunities when they come.

I can't tell you how many times I've looked back on my old notes and seen goals written down like that, that I'd forgotten ever writing, but in the mean time, they'd come true. With lots of effort from me, of course, but I think that writing them down and thinking about them guided me & helped me grab opportunities when they arose.
Well, SS and Medicare are over 40% of the annual Federal budget and will quickly rise as the funding issues start appearing.

SS is actually the biggest program and percentage of the annual budget we have. Medicare is second, defense is the third.
On your first point, the "we have until 2018 before the trust fund runs out" factoid is apocryphal. Present estimates put that date into the 2040s. And that's simply the point at which Social Security starts being funded out the general budget, assuming the retirement age isn't adjusted.

On your second point, there's "birth rate" and there's "productivity", and those are two hugely different things.

On your third point: again, 1/3rd of Social Security recipients derive almost their entire income from it, and fully 2/3rds of recipients derive more than half their income for it. Your anecdote isn't particularly convincing.
SS is a Ponzi scheme. Payout for current investors is provided by the payin of future investors.

Then to fool you, a small fraction of the program is devoted to other legitimate purposes. Disability/survivor benefits are an extremely small portion of social security, less than 1% last time I checked.

Incidentally, as far as living to 100, buy a lifetime annuity. Or even just have the government pay for retirement for the poor 90+ crowd. Again, an extremely small part of SS.
This post is only slightly more retarded than the much-longer-winded article (and neither one has as much substance as, say, the average 37signals blog).
Kakuteru: A Blogging and Lifestreaming Mashup (+Invites)
Arctic Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979 -  fastest rate of change on record
^ Only sane comment in this whole stupid thread. Anyone who pays 100 dollars for a knife is a sucker.
Tying the Knot
All other things being equal (which I don't know for a fact), Linode is significantly cheaper than Slicehost, considering the differences in memory usage between x86 (32 bit) and x86_64:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
Will there be something like this in Delhi, sometime this year?

Somehow i always miss the dates for events like this.
Maybe he wants incremental search on the content.
Trying to control stocks in the short term is for suckers and idiots, and also it is not possible. Steve Jobs will die. Any sentient being buying the stock knows that; factor it in to your purchasing decisions.
[citation needed]

Social Security is 21% of the budget currently. That's:

* at par with Medicare and related medical entitlements.

* rapidly going to be outpaced by Medicare liabilities

* less than we spend on defense

* funded from the Social Security trust fund, unlike those other two
NautilusSVN has three developers, has been going a year, and is undergoing it's first major rewrite for 0.12, a few weeks away - hence the upcoming in the title.

I'm intending to jump in (as a user, and perhaps a developer - it's Python / Glade/ GTK) when 0.12 is out.
I studied economics, but I never had the feeling of understanding much about the economy. Most of economics, including microeconomics and macroeconomics always seemed to me completely detached from reality. Theories for developing poor countries seem to follow fashions that change every ten years. But there are a few topics where I felt the knowledge was interesting and relevant. This was 15 years ago and in german, but I'll try to find the right words in english.

National accounting: how gross domestic product, the balance of payments etc... are calculated.

The creation of money: how central banks create money and control inflation. This is probably the only theory on which all, well most, economists agree.

Economic history: this is the most down to earth subject, the one that relies most on evidence. It's where you will find accounts about industrialization and crashes that micro- and macroeconomics almost never consider, because they're too busy dreaming about equilibriums.

History of economic theory: For every topic there are a thousand contradicting opinions. It's dismaying if you want to find an answer to a question, but it's fascinating if you look at it like a history of thought. Then it becomes interesting in the same way as philosophy.

Finance: the rocket science behind valuing options, exotic financial products, Black, Scholes and Merton's nobel prize and the crash of LTCM. This looks like hard science, there's a lot of math, but it all rests on shaky assumptions. If a model gives you a different value than the market, it's more likely you found a flawed model than a mispriced security. Here I actually have a very readable book to recommend: Capital ideas, by Peter Bernstein.

And last but not least, one of the most enlightening sources, although systematically biased in favour of free markets and international trade: the economist, I mean the magazine.
NautilusSVN is written aiming for RCS independence. Everything's neatly abstracted - they're just working on getting SVN stable first.
This seems like a perfect time for someone to build a new FeedBurner. And while you're collecting all those feeds, build a better feed reader too so I can finally give up dealing with Bloglines' issues (GReader is not an alternative for me).
Greg Little's homepage has links to two papers and his Master's thesis which provides the actual technical information: http://glittle.org/

They refer to it there as "keyword programming." I was very skeptical when I went to their description page, but after giving a cursory look at their actual work, I'm interested. It looks like they use context in the program and heuristics as guides through the search space to come up with a good guess.

There's a lot of comments here that are - rightly - skeptical, but before saying "it can't be done," check out what they actually did. It gets use one step closer to "Computer, Earl Grey, hot."