skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good insight, thanks. The bureaucracy of providing care, especially where it involves the VA (which as mentioned is a different story than the VHA itself), can indeed screw up all the other benefits in the system. Definitely a cautionary tale to keep in mind.

By the way, as long as we're all here, this article by a fellow I used to work for is a remarkably insightful view of the problems involved with our current healthcare system:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...
Yeah, it seems to me it would be much easier just to buy one. He should start selling pre-assembled kits.
Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles
Anyone brewing any kind of volume would want successful variances (mishaps or otherwise) to be replicable. Thus they would need to have a highly consistent baseline (or at least be able to see and measure the variances) in order to experiment with single variables.
Forget your fancy data science try overkill analytics
>Surely even the most hardcore Apple fanatic thinks this is completely unnecessary and designed to stifle competition?

My guess is they'll laud the decision.
> homeopathy, which even James Randi admits was more effective than western medicine in the 1800s

I hope you realize how worthless this statement is in a discussion of modern medicine.

Also, it's incredibly racist to call 'medicine that works' 'Western medicine'. Do you also call 'math that works' 'Western mathematics'?
To combat people promoting their own tutorials and stuff, just have them include a short snippet as to what that resource concerns that others don't - what makes that resource worth visiting/reading?
There are automated home brewing systems available on the market already. Seem to be 5-10 times the cost of a non-automated homebrew setup.

Here's the first I found with some random googling around: http://brewmation.com/Panels.html
> I'd like to say we've become empirical enough about what practices we place belief in that we could just treat all cases of quackery as malicious fraud - but the very prevalence of such issues tends to support the opposite conclusion.

There are enough cognitive biases I can't support this conclusion. Confirmation bias alone accounts for a lot of this crap, I'm sure.

Fundamentally, though, there's a big difference between crap we know doesn't and can't work, like homeopathy, and therapies that are in the pipeline and might be accepted or rejected on their merits.

Homeopathy has had its turn and it failed. That goes for everything else I called quackery. Don't confuse that with something we haven't tried yet.
Indeterminate.
This is probably the root cause of grade inflation in American universities. Terrible, terrible idea.
> Rents, both commercial and residential, are completely out of control and it actively drives away business.

I find this constant complaining about rents and zoning whenever the Bay Area comes up amusing. Why should SF or the Bay Area strive for growth at all costs?

The rents are presumably as they are because the demand for the space that is available is sky high? It would seem they don't particularly need to change.

The Bay Area also already has a population density that is high. If the people who live there want to keep voting for local governments that wants to restrict increases in density, and it stops you from living or setting up show there, then don't.

Personally to me, the current character of the place is a huge part of what would make the Bay Area attractive if I was to consider relocating anywhere.
Do other languages have a word for this?
Some kids would be excellent at grading teachers. Unfortunately some would just have a grudge, or just have a power trip and try to sabotage teachers. I think on average they would be a good reflection of how well-liked the teacher is, but maybe not how effective they were at teaching.

For example the tough math teacher would get a bad evaluation, but the cream-puff teacher who never assigned homework and gave everyone A's would get a good evaluation.
The placebo effect is remarkably powerful. But there's nothing special about homeopathy.
Depends a lot how tightly controlled his fermentation fridge is.
I'm by no means eager to dismiss an argument made seriously, but if you're going for apologetics for something as appalling as torture, you're going to have to work your way up to it gradually. That's been way beyond western civilization's Overton window for a couple of generations now. It may just be Something You Can't Say.

And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad): 'People I admire are busy building and not known'
Rare breed here, non-mil, non-gov, non-local computer programmer in the Florida Keys. Fish stocks are declining so noticeably year after year after year. You will not be able to mark-off coordinates as a fish refuge without local multi-generational fishermen families (with more political clout than you can imagine here in not-quite-Florida) complaining and getting their way. It's quite a lost cause. And I won't purchase farm-raised fish, because I'm well aware of the PCB content of your Tilapia. I wish I knew what to tell you, except that your children won't know anything about Tuna, Ahi, or Hogfish.
I personally have found that f.lux is insufficient. It does significantly tone down the amount of blue that my laptop screen puts out, but even when set to the most red-shifted setting possible, my laptop screen still puts out enough blue light to keep me from getting sleepy.
> which came to as little as $2659 http://flightfox.com/rtw

Typo? That link says the lowest was $2,569.
The truth based on criteria for truth. Irrefutable truths exist, like 1 + 1 = 2.
I'm a big believer in the fallacy of Chesterton's fence, so I actually agree with what you're saying. My point is that disruptive businesses serve as the 'reset' button for these industries. The problems get ignored at first, then rediscovered, and finally re-solved in a (hopefully) better way. Eventually, the cycle comes full circle, and the disruptors become the disrupted.

It may not be the most efficient system in the world, and there are definitely casualties along the way, but it does seem to work more often than other approaches (at least that I'm aware of... would love to know about other approaches that have a similar/higher success ratio).
NI had a section of demos like this at their technical conference this August. They were all hobby projects. Things that engineers just thought "were cool" and were stupidly easy to make with this hardware. There was a crane game, a 6-foot-tall aluminum slingshot controller for Angry Birds, and a compactRIO-powered guitar amp.

It's startling to think of how much money/time engineers save with prototyping and graphical system design software like this, and even though NI stuff powers telescopes and water filtration systems and loads of other important stuff, things like this come out and remind everyone that there's fun to be had.
Actually that would be the Vietnam war.
Would you use an app that verifies your reasoning (for the occasions you are too busy to research the truth or not actively looking for it)?
I think that is valuable for sure, but I'd add that I would not have contributions via pull requests in this case. The reason is that there is some expectation when you go through the trouble of forking, cloning, editing, pushing back to the fork, and doing a pull request that your contribution will be accepted, and it very likely may not, which will result in anger, which is not a good thing.
I know a lot of people in the industry are wondering if this type of legislation will come stateside. Don't know if anybody else noticed this, but with Google+ it looks like they've already implemented "opt-in" style facerec.

But I think people will be surprised how high the rates are when they make the 'opt-in' button the big blue one.
It would really depend across classes and groups. I've worked a lot with kids in academic (schools) and semi-academic settings (scientific summer camps), and I've had groups that had an awareness for "what was best for them".

For example, in one programming summer camp I led, I've had kids come to me at the end of the 10 days and tell me that I was their favorite educator and a great director because I was tough but fair and expected them to learn and progress, while some other educator was lame because even though he was super nice and laid back, they didn't learn anything with him.

Now of course, during the camp itself, I've overheard more than one kid telling another that I was super mean and terrible. But in the end, most of them were vocal about how they appreciated me.
Kids in general tend to be very aware of and appreciate fairness, consistency, and holding them up to standards and pushing them to get better.

Cases like that are not the exception, but sadly not the majority either (the specific example I cited was with French "gifted" kids between 14-18 years old). So it would really depend.
which would make WhatsApp about as easy to spoof as SMS. Oh no!
This is one way this process has been validated, from the submitted article: "The responses did indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings. (By comparison, teachers who get a master’s degree—one of the few ways to earn a pay raise in most schools —delivered about one more month of learning per year than teachers without one.)

. . . .

"The survey did not ask Do you like your teacher? Is your teacher nice? This wasn’t a popularity contest. The survey mostly asked questions about what students saw, day in and day out.

"Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:

1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.

2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.

3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.

4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.

5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes."

Here is earlier reporting (10 December 2010) from the New York Times about the same issue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html
Here is the website of Ronald Ferguson's research project at Harvard:

http://tripodproject.wpengine.com/about/our-team/

And here are some links about the project from the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness:

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/ncte/news/NCTE_Conference_Using_S...

LAST EDIT: I'm amazed at how many of the comments in this thread appear to be about issues thoroughly discussed in the submitted article, but unresponsive to what the submitted article said. On this kind of issue, it's an especially good practice to read the fine article before assuming what is being discussed. We all know about school, but specific proposals for school reform have specific details that make some worse than others, and can be empirically tested.
The story addressed this at length. Actually, the student evaluations were an excellent predictor of test score gains.
Looking at the comments, I find it kind of odd that this issue is polarizing. What exactly is the nature of the divide between the extremes of the people who think we've had no progress vs those who think we've had considerable progress?

I would hazard a guess that the "substantial-progress" crowd is assuming that physics and chemistry have been largely figured out and there's nothing else to do there except tidying up some loose ends and working with what we've got and the only place progress could possibly come from is through information technology manipulating what we have.

The no-progress crowd are waiting for the next big fundamental breakthrough like the discovery of the microbe, quantum physics, and electricity.

I still don't understand why the vitriol is thrown around on this one so hard by the "substantial progress" crowd. Maybe they think that the "no-progress" crowd are a bunch of lunatics for believing there are fundamental things that we could discover that could significantly increase our understanding of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry or biology.
This is exactly the sort of thing I am concerned about. Definitely don't want it to be a place to piss people off.

Thanks for the reply
I think it's implied that there's a difference between a taco stand that is just running in a local geography and not really innovating, and a company like Chipotle which spent a lot of time and effort optimizing their business model to make it replicable while taking large investments to pursue fast growth. He's not referring to Chipotle in the essay. It's why says "restaurants" and not restaurant chains.
"But a teacher quality survey? That's just a weapon."

Only if it's used as part of a (simplistic) algorithm.

And besides, why would students want to fire the good teachers? That doesn't really make sense. (As someone who was sent to the principal's office on a semi-regular basis.)
You are probably right if you are adding someone with any mutual friends. If you can frame it more as "I saw you comment on x's status so I added you" that is fine.
That is not the only organization for DC taxi drivers. Here's another https://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Business-Association-of... and there are more.

None of them are particularly powerful or well-connected. It's nothing like New York.
Go has similar functionality:

If you only need the second item in the range (the value), use the blank identifier, an underscore, to discard the first:

sum := 0
for _, value := range array {
sum += value
}

from: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#for
I found that to be a pretty nice writeup, a little more accessible for the curious layman than a pair of blog entries I wrote on RSA (http://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/06/rsa-encryption-and-other...) and Elgamal (http://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/07/encryption-part-2-elgama...)

Encryption topics were the big wake-up call for me regarding not relying on Wikipedia for math/tech info. When I started the above blog posts, I dug around for background info from a variety of sources until I got my head around the math, and found Wikipedia's entries on encryption topics to be basically unfixable without doing a large enough rewrite to guarantee an immediate revert.

Anyway, I wish this rosedu post had come a few months earlier; it would have saved me quite a wild goose chase.
Would that it were. The owner/admin's made some bad decisions that opened it up to being restricted/gamed and as a result the site is suffering as a platform for free and independent speech.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess. Some people cite backroom lobbying by people from places with authoritarian factions, e.g. Reddit and SA, but I don't have the resources to verify the rumors.
I recently was forced to enter a password of not more than 8 characters as part of college applications. I was somewhat flummoxed, because the disposable password I use for applications I want to be able to forget about is nine characters. That is the lowest I have ever seen: I hope that there is noone worse.
That's very misleading without providing proper context.

In Hahneman's time, medicine was actively harmful and virtually never actively helpful. The risk benefit analysis would not come out in favor of getting treatment.

In contrast, homeopathy does nothing. It's placebo. And giving placebo, it turns out, is safer than actively sticking dirty instruments into your patient's bloodstream and giving them bacteremia.

In that context, the statement makes sense, but is still obviously tongue in cheek. Homeopathy never worked, but medicine at the time actively harmed.
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It might be helpful to the wider community of freelancers if you used your popular bully pulpit to expound upon the procurement tactics you have encountered, and how you responded to still win over the clients.

The "we found someone else cheaper than you" line is used all the time. It doesn't matter if it is true or not. Procurement's job definition is to convince you, Joe Freelance, that you are a commodity that competes solely on price for them. If you let them manipulate you into that mindset, then it is time to re-evaluate your unique value proposition and your negotiation process. This approach is also why you always see the business "hand off" to procurement once you have convinced the business they need you. They are trying to use the process to negotiate piecemeal and divorce the value props you just used from price, and the failure of procurement to realize why you are different and a better value is not a bug, it is a feature of their process. There is a lot more to be said, but I find a lot of technical consultants who look down on sales people are unaware of these basics of negotiation.
Are you being facetious? If not, would you mind expanding on this? I'm greatly interested in the recent trend towards grade inflation.
IOS 6 allows tweets, Facebook posts from locked device.
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The reason that I agree that there is low innovation is that innovation eventually results in economic acceleration. Think industrial revolution.

However, innovation has not stopped if you consider that in the last century we have Ford Motor company, fast food, marketing as industry, rock-and-roll, Sony Walkman, Levis, iPod, etc. There is a ton of innovation.

But unfortunately, it needs to be disruptive innovation that changes how efficient we are and improves quality of life. Writing new webapps does not do that. Designing new iPhones does not do that.

Something else to consider is that the time is ripe for something other than technological innovation. What if we could better understand the world we live in and come closer to God? What if we could overcome the 50/50 political divide causing so much hate in our country from both sides? What if peace could be reached with all countries? That would also be innovation, because we can't seem to figure out a way to do it currently.
For example the tough math teacher would get a bad evaluation, but the cream-puff teacher who never assigned homework and gave everyone A's would get a good evaluation.

I always hear this objection, and it's usually brought up to discourage even experimental data gathering. I don't buy it at all, and I think it says more about the objectors' mentality than about the students'.
The article just doesn't apply for the developing world. The China, and India of 1990 was completely different from what it is today.

Speaking from experience, 20 years ago most people in India did not have a phone and it was impossible to get a home phone without string-pulling and bribery. Now 50% of the population has a mobile phone; no bribes. 30 years ago, Sugar was rationed and you could buy a 1 kg of Sugar for a household per month. Now, there is plentiful Sugar.

Things that Developed countries take for granted - Fridges, Washing Machines, Microwaves, Dining tables, TVs, personal transport (cars, motorcycles), better access to health care, better access to education, simply did not exist or was out of reach for most. I'm not saying that they are now available to everyone, but the reach has expanded.

20 years the politicians made promises that Rice would be available at low rates, now they make promises that TVs would be available at low rates.

If that's not a revolution, I wonder what is. Heck even electricity is still a luxury in India.
Upvote and share if you get something good
I've stayed in Palo Alto and Menlo Park in hotels a lot, and while I can't speak for lots of other areas, what I can say is that despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers license (lived primarily in Oslo and London, so not really needed one), I had no problems getting around on foot.

Was it less convenient than what I'm used to? Yes. It'd have been great with more buses and trains. But it worked. I could get to the grocery store. I could get to plenty of shops. I could get to dozens of restaurants - I know this from making a point out of trying new restaurants every time I was in town - as well as bars etc. I'd even go in to SF now and again, though Caltrain's schedule is just atrocious (and for the record: years ago, I did go out clubbing in SF while staying in Santa Cruz without having a car to get me back - if you want it bad enough, even that works).

Once I stayed in Atherton, right on the edge near Redwood City, while the office I was visiting was in downtown Menlo Park, and I walked to/from most days. That's the only time when I thought things were a bit too inconvenient for my liking. Not so much the distances - it was only a 30-35 minute walk or so from what I remember - but due to the large plots in Atherton, the fastest walking route is along El Camino, and part of that stretch was pretty much without light or sidewalk or decent shoulder.

Sure, there are plenty of locations you could live in that area which would make managing on foot too inconvenient, and finding somewhere in the middle of Atherton or similar might not be great if you want to get to lots of stuff without a car, but there are plenty of parts of the Bay Area outside of SF which are viable on foot, and far more that are viable with short car journeys now and again

So, yes: Spoiled. Large parts of the worlds population - including in developed countries - are living places where getting to stuff they want or need takes far longer on average.
The real lack of innovation is in the social and political structures we have to live with. And those are a product of primate brains that evolve at a much slower rate than our technological sophistication.

Right at the moment, the dominant political regime on this planet is still concerned with areas of land under military hegemony, and is apparently completely incapable of dealing with things like keeping this planet habitable over the short term, much less the long term.

We have paleolithic brains dealing with state-of-the-art environmental problems in the context of 17th century political institutions and 20th century financial institutions in a society run by people who would like to retreat to 12th century religious values because THE FUTURE IS SCARY AND UNCERTAIN.

Like someone said, we are in one whole joojooflop situation here.

[1]. Joojooflop http://www.zootle.net/afda/faq/e.shtml
You can read meaning into anything. For the most part though, dreams are just synapses firing randomly. I wouldn't read too much into them, or at least not take the interpretations too seriously.
Daily attention. My friend has done it for several years, and often his dedication is a good enough for why he wins.

But I think it's worse than daily attention. The MLB isn't like the NFL in that its schedule is spread out all over the place. It has to be constantly on your mind to make sure you have the right relief pitchers started, etc.
What advice do you give to a new start-up team?
Right. The effectiveness of student reviews needs to be studied in a context where the kids know the reviews are important. Might be a different result.
My first reaction the first time I took Caltrain to SF, was: "This doesn't look like SF. Where's the city?" If it hadn't been a terminus I'd have suspected I'd have left the train too early.