skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The truth is a huge body of CAM has been looked at, and tested scientifically; most of it has been found to be wanting; some has been found to be useful, and is now 'medicine', some of it has still not been looked at.

It's this kind of nuance that I want to see - and the lack of it that triggered my first response.

Should I wait for other people to decide? I don't know. I am opinionated and a passionate advocate of better healthcare and increased scientific awareness. Sometimes I express my points of view.

Yes, and you possibly overestimate just how much can be known with certainty, given how much complexity exists in the natural world, and how little of it is (or can be) understood.

Without meaning to sound like a complete tosser, I try to adopt a Socratic position on matters of science, particularly medicine: all that we can really know is that we know little.

Sure, we can think we know things based on evidence, but we cannot fully know the limits of that evidence, or what new evidence may be discovered to disprove what we thought was proven by earlier evidence. Really, the history of science is replacing old evidence with new evidence.

This is why I think this project is such an interesting exercise, and why react so strongly to the idea of dogmatically ruling anything out.
they have the worst possible state government of the union

Must be all the rich people that live here; they ruin everything!
Framed through Naval's vision of individuals as micro-enterprises, Dave and Fred's perspectives line up pretty nicely together. The line between consumer and enterprise is blurring in more ways than one.
I think what nugget is getting at, is there are many government programs that are mismanaged (welfare, social security, education to some extent, and others). Who legitimately feels good that they pay taxes only to see other Americans living off of Welfare, generations unemployed, living off of welfare (which btw, I consider to be fraud). People that live on welfare (no, not people who use the program as it was intended, as temporary help), don't pay taxes and the benefit from those of us that do pay taxes.

When confronted with situations like the one described above, any rational person would wonder why we want higher taxes, when we should really be focusing on reforming our broken social programs. Only then, when we take legitimate steps to reform our broken social programs, should we be considering higher taxes.
Mmm, can you elaborate?

Like Red Cross or local church's soup kitchen, how does their activity not benefit the disadvantaged?
It is a mistake to try to analyze spending in this way.

Dollars are fungible. Dollars directed to one particular budget item (education budgets in your example) simply frees up other dollars to be used elsewhere (pensions and benefits in the parent comment).
> a more perfect use of modern communications technologies

Grammar problems! Definitely not someone I want to have working on me if you are truly a med school student.
I was thinking this before I read your comment.
My general rate is $50/hour. However, I'm a full-time student and as such I have very little capacity for employment and have a difficult time locating projects at all, so my time has effectively no intrinsic value. At best, I made what equated to $3.75/hour over the course of the summer.

Undertaking personal projects yields far more value than purchasing a solution when one's time is more or less devoid of monetary value and one's net worth is less than a thousand dolars with unsteady and extremely limited income that arrives in disjunct and infrequent chunks.

I'd love to be in a position to drop thousands of dollars each year on sass. Unfortunately, such options are far beyond my means.
That would be the sixteenth amendment to The Constitution of the United States of America.
If small government advocates really wanted a broad base of support, they'd insist that tax rates always cover government expenditures. Then people would be upset about big government.

However, the current attack against raising taxes (from their current historically low rates) only raises the debt and weakens our fiscal foundation.
uh, cheap thing sell good?
This is fairly off topic, but as someone who has dabbled with GIS before, zip codes mapped as geographic areas bother me.

"ZIP codes designate only delivery points within the United States and its dependencies, as well as locations of its armed forces."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code

So a zip code is more properly represented as an ordered point string or point cloud, rather than an area. There exist zip codes with up to 11 non-contiguous areas, zip codes which are valid only for the north half of an east-west street, and other oddities. You can fudge this a little by just drawing bounding boxes, but then you have up to 5 zip codes overlapping in some places.

That bit of trivia aside, they do make sense from a real estate point of view because a) all domiciles will have a zip code and b) it is usually freely available on listings.

Generally though, it's better to translate any given address to a census tract or census block group, since those divisions are actually defined as "a geographic region defined for the purpose of taking a census" - they can be properly mapped without ambiguity, crossovers, discontinuities, and other boggling features of zip codes, (though not of course with perfect regularity) and they also coordinate well with demographic data like median income - I'd be very interested to see a graph of percent of median income per square foot - I suspect you'd find some very 'hot' areas that don't seem like it.
you guys feel free to mock 9GAG, 500, & YC.

9GAG has grown to tens of millions of users and billions of page views per month in less than 2 years. the company was generating single-digit millions with a team of less than 10 people.

in short, it's a great business that has tremendous scale, and you haters can all go put a sock in it.
Full disclosure: I'm not really that interested in stuff like this so I've not even dug around looking for this but what is the number of phones that sold out?

It just feels like shoddy journalism and more sensationalist nonsense in the Apple/Android fiasco.

So, how many units?

Seriously: they could have sold 10 of these things thus far and everything I have bothered to read on the topic would still be technically correct.

The fact that they are not making money on Android is cold comfort for those of us who bought into the promise of free ad supported hardware and calls that was the initial vision for Android. Instead of that massively disruptive brave new future we have a slew of, let's face it: shittyarse phones that look like they came with a Happy Meal and a stupid patent war.

Apple are no angels here but Google: you lied. Make good on that promise or shut up. Oh, and thanks for partnering with providers and screwing us on Net Neutrality in the process too...
People are responsible for their own stupidity.

(Although personally, I don't see what the gender of the HR department adds to the discussion anyway.)
It doesn't make a lot of sense to my why Metro applications need to be fullscreen, especially if lots of applications are supposed to work on a phone form factor too. Stick them in some standard chrome at a standard size, and let them float if the user wants them to float.
This thread is a sad example of why articles on politics are discouraged on HN. None of the comments engage substantively with the article and most consist of unsupported assertions, as well as failing at staatistics.
I can't say I'm a huge fan, it is really undiscoverable with the charms etc... The one normal person I showed it to kept hitting escape to try to get out of where they were.

I don't think it will do overly great based on what I've seen. But we'll see if I'm wrong!
Your argument assumes that people making spending decisions care about the debt. 30 years of government run by both sides of the aisle demonstrate that revenue and expenditures are entirely decoupled.

Whether you feed or don't feed the monster doesn't impact the monster's size. If you stop funding government, all you get is a larger debt.
Just to be clear, I'm mostly talking about companies drastically scaling back their plans for growth in recent years, which obviously impacts private investors in the equity markets as well. Countless CEOs have gone on the record saying they've postponed hiring and capital investments because of the current tax and regulatory environment, in addition to the general dysfunction of Washington.

As you point out, Apple is sitting on over 100 billion, and countless other companies are sitting on amounts of capital that were previously unheard of. You can't honestly argue that it's a coincidence that all of these companies are simultaneously gun-shy to invest in growth.
both areas have tons of opportunity.

however, there is plenty of growth in consumer spending and particularly in online ecommerce all over the world. while I won't disagree corporations are also sitting on lots of cash, it's certainly not the case that consumer online spending is flat, even in the US (& absolutely not around the world).
I work on numerical simulations, where I deal with colossal arrays of floating point numbers on hundreds or thousands of nodes. I want tools that can help with the following:

1. Visualizing code. Rendering C++ and/or Fortran as LaTeX would be very helpful for lines of code like this, where I've spent too much time tracking down misplaced parens:

k1(1,1)=-Im*(Omega_minus_n*(rho13(i,j)+conjg(rho12(i,j)))-Omega_plus_n*(rho12(i,j)+conjg(rho13(i,j))))+gamma1*(rho22(i,j)+rho33(i,j))

2. A better way to debug and test mathematical programs. Debugging is extremely hard when you have thousands of processes doing calculations that aren't reproducible by hand, so it's very difficult or impossible to create test cases for subunits of the program. The only tests are Fermi calculations and comparison of the whole program's output with an analytical solution, which is often not possible, and is not useful for debugging.

3. A language with the following characteristics:
- Within 10% of Intel/PGI Fortran on tight numerical loops
- Array and distributed/concurrent syntax with lightweight threads and syntactical support for GASnet/MPI.
- Parallel load balancing, preferably across nodes. A few of the algorithms I use are adaptive or have parts of the solution domain that require much more work than other parts, leading to situations where naive/maintainable MPI code leaves most processors idle.
- Hindley-Milner type inference, typeclasses/typeclass-like features, operator overloading/syntax extension, and effortless interoperation with C/Fortran. An IDE with syntax rendering like Maple or Mathematica's would be a HUGE plus. I don't know why this doesn't exist for usably fast languages.
- Supports an interactive mode with easy visualization

The closest language I've seen is Cray's Chapel, but there are several things I don't like about it. Its imperative/oo design and lack of first class functions/tco are unacceptable, since the algorithms I use need to use the integer side of the machine as well as the floating point ones. Right now I use either Charm++ (http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/) with Intel's array syntax, or Fortran 2008 for some inherited code. C++ has non-ideal semantics for numerical code, and doing non-trivial algorithms in Fortran is still a nightmare, especially when using MPI, as communication code quickly becomes the main part of the program. Something like Sisal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sisal/), if it was modernized and extended to distributed architectures, would be amazing. It used to beat typical Fortran by 20%.

4. I absolutely need to account for cache behavior, otherwise my simulations will take months to run instead of weeks. I would love anyone who wrote a practical tool that automatically tiled loops, since doing this manually turns code into an unmaintainable rat's nest very quickly, or wrote a library of skeletons for tiled loops and cache oblivious algorithms.
Just to clarify - this is not the case in Singapore. A local director is required if the directors do not have work visas, but the companies can be wholly owned by foreigners.
1) Run the latest version of the OS and browsers, and check for updates often.

2) Run as a "normal" user account--not an admin.

3) Disable all auto-opening of so-called "safe" files.

4) Disable Java browser plugin entirely.

5) Configure browser to not load Flash or other plugin content unless I click to authorize it. Might require an extension like ClickToFlash in some browsers.

6) Be cautious. Stay away from sketchy sites and don't open emails and/or attachments that seem random, unexpected, or suspicious.
Just not true. The settings are still there and were in the iOS6 betas as well. I know because I would have been affected.

Even if the settings were gone from the UI it would still be possible to set them with profiles, which can be distributed via the operators website.

Some "advanced" settings that could only be set with profiles have even moved into the UI in later versions of iOS, like Cisco VPN, S/MIME.
It's not necessarily a person - I think PG has a machine-learning algorithm that's trained on the decisions of actual human mods, and then uses various features of the comment history to determine whether to hell-ban.
Pretty Bird is an awesome movie about entrepreneurship :)
Worldwide representatives/salespersons in each country where they have a presence?
E.g. http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/11/airbnb-officially-lands-in...
Quick mash up adding plots for population density, % renter property and % owners (this took about 2 minutes - I was just intrigued how they all compared, which seemed especially relevant given the most recent XKCD).

http://www.holehouse.org/other_content/sanfran.jpeg

Source of maps:
http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/demographics/
I think the lesson is to focus on consumer & small biz opportunities with clear path to revenue.

if you don't have clear path to revenue, then you better have tremendous traction.
I was referring more to their referendum system.
Oh wow I'd never realized that she was from my home town. She's done some pretty spectacular things.
thanks, that's a good summary of our approach.

however, we will also invest in a few stories without clear path to revenue if growth is strong. but admittedly this isn't our favorite strategy. we certainly prefer strong business model over none, even with a small base of customers.
There is nothing to stop the service provider from offering a profile on their website. With a short URL the costumer could set it up right from the store using the wifi connection and 2 taps. These profiles can even be signed.
When capturing keyboard keys, please don't capture anything with modifiers other than shift. Trying to hit ctrl-r (refresh) or ctrl-t (new tab) captures the letter as though typed and blocks the browser action.
That's how most large sites handle abuse & anti-spam protection. One of the cardinal rules of spam-defense is that you don't let spammers know that you've caught them, you just silently quarantine their spam. Otherwise, they'll adopt countermeasures and you're stuck in a rat race.
> With the threshold at $250k, the tax hikes would still only bring in enough added revenue to cover 8 days of federal spending.

Does that include the restoration of pre-Bush capital gains tax? Because I'm sure that would add up to a lot. In fact, I think that's the biggest thing that the ultra-rich have become addicted to in the past decade.
> The responsibility is all on you, the same as if you decide to do something a normal doctor recommends.

I am not sure if you know, but Health Care Professionals do share some part of responsibilities. When a treatment goes wrong, if you can prove that their choice was made on shaky assumptions or doubtful logic, they can legally be sued and asked for reparations.

> You read the sources they're citing.

For sure you have never looked at the clinical trial sources to reply in such a simple way. Have you ever read a clinical trial report? There is no way of telling that the results were not rigged, that it was not pure luck (as failed studies are generally not published) and that the results are applicable to your case.

It may be easy to do in other fields, but in medicine there is no such thing as full data transparency.
It's funny how quickly people forget. There is one inevitable end result of such severe disproportionate concentrations of wealth. I'm sure we're nowhere near that point yet, but those who argue against redistribution are guaranteeing we will get there at some point.
Your post above should be in the dictionary under the title: 'Apologist.'

...there may be further references to Stockholm Syndrome (he doesn't mean to do this to me, that's just his process...)

MS has a history of just not 'getting' it with Windows. This is just the next chapter.
Author evidently does not understand that the Nexus line is and has always been used as a benchmark of the capabilities of Android and as an incentive for hardware partners to keep up with the reference series.

If Google actually wanted to make money off hardware at this point they have the economic means to do it. It is evidently no their goal.
I hang out with artists a lot, and they hate 9gag, mostly because it is a business based on wholescale theft of intellectual property.

Just like Youtube, of course, but Youtube actually shares ad revenue with creators, while "publishing" your work on 9gag is manifestly insane.
You claim that these laws don't hurt civil rights because they are legally enforceable. This doesn't add up. Legality is irrelevant.

It's easy to fall into a pattern of accept government to be a definitive source of truth about political concepts. This is flawed thinking. Were the government to say that up was down, it would not make it any more true.

Likewise, when the government chooses to call something property doesn't mean that it is property by a reasonable definition.

The enforcement of content protection laws impede privacy, free speech, free expression and the principle of live and let live. It's a clear-cut imposition on civil rights.
+1 I've met John and spoken to Patrick on email. Both super nice dudes.
Hahaha :)
Re: copying... I'm not sure that there's really a necessary distinction between copying input and simply being able to type fast. In this scenario, yes, you're simply copying input; for that reason I added a 800 ms delay to allow the brain to process the word before the variable timer is enabled, so ultimately what's being tested is your ability to write what is in your brain already.

That said, I do acknowledge that WPM is not necessarily the best gauge of efficiency. I'm a programmer, and I'm not sure exactly how WPM relates to my work (I'd be curious to see a study) since much of what I type is "nonsense" words to begin with, and WPM is largely a function of your ability to habitually reproduce the same character sets (aka, common words in your given language).
Andrew Chen covered this phenomena on his recent When does high growth not imply product/market fit?[1]

[1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/06/20/quora-when-does-high-growth-...
Often times the absurdly specific skillset requirements are an H1B game. To get an H1B, you have to prove that no citizen is qualified for the position, so when companies find a foreign candidate they like, they'll put out a job ad with exactly the skillset that that candidate has, and then when nobody responds or all the candidates are unqualified, they can hire the person that they really wanted to hire in the first place.
Yeah, back before Bush's looting of the US treasury for his rich pals, we had budget surpluses. In fact, it might have been possible that we would now have paid off the debt if Bush never took office.
I would also like to see one. I think we know the profit margin is probably slim (low price + small batch), but exact figures would be nice to see.
And rather than pass it down to your children, consider selling any property in Galveston, New Orleans or Miami Beach. Even on the lower-end estimates, those areas are thoroughly deluged. Or pass it on and let them sell it, whichever is smarter from a tax perspective.
Thanks for the addendum! I'm aware of that corollary but it's harder to explain as a coherent thesis. Paul always made it very clear to me that "there are starving startups in India than more traction than you" and "10mm users is the new 1mm users" so I've never been clear where that line was for you guys. As such, I usually leave it out of my explanations of my understanding of the 500 thesis.
What is "property" other than a state-enforced claim to ownership? If the state (read: society) decides to take some back it is well within its "right" to do so, as your only claim to property is based on decree of society.
It's not a great experience for working, I had to admit that. But as an "entertainment OS" I found it really interesting.
Why are you framing the argument as if incomes are something that are owned by the government instead of the person who earned the money?

The notion that taxation should be predicated on whether the government or the person can 'better use' the person's money is damn scary.
I really wish that I had joined HN more than a month ago, just so that I could downvote you. This belongs on Reddit or Huffpo, not HN.

Ironically, it's this sort of OWS mullarkey that's helping to prolong the environment of economic uncertainty that's hurting us so badly today.
Thanks for your reply. I'm working on a SaaS as well (http://inqix.com). I'm thinking it'll take me about as long to be ready.

Good luck!
Our web technology is such that we don't need to settle for a sub-par user experience that is a relic of the days where we had to serve static HTML documents one by one.
Maybe some private charities do benefit the disadvantaged. But that doesn't mean those private charities work for the disadvantaged.

Who is the customer of a private charity? Who is the product of a private charity?
Demonstrably wrong. Developers (like anyone) are happy to pay for things if they can identify value. The problem is with the seller, not the buyer: people keep trying to sell things to developers that they can more easily build themselves. But today's platform as a service companies (like Twilio and others named in the piece) are providing a stack that can't easily be replicated by nerds working in isolation.
Is it possible for non-investors (i.e. small business owners) to avoid taxes using strategies like a "Cayman Islands mail drop"?

If so, I propose this HACK to solve the tax issue:

Create a site that disseminates information on how small businesses can avoid (not evade) taxes using these approaches that are typically only known to advanced acolytes. Evolve processes that significantly reduces the cost for avoiding taxes effectively. (I imagine that that these complicated loopholes aren't actually that complicated, just that the knowledge is rarified.)

If many people, including a large portion of the upper-middle class, reduced their tax liability, this would significantly increase the amount of attention paid to this issue.
I joined HN four years ago. How would YOU know what belongs on HN?

Your comment is extremely shallow and false to boot. It belongs on Rush Limbaugh, not on HN.
That was my point, it might not have the best content on the internet,but it clearly has a huge user base, and a very active one. I don't get why it wouldn't be a good investment decision.
I had no idea how low-lying some cities are. Especially in the southeast US.
JoliOS - HTML5 Cloud Operating System
If Mr. Buffet is so concerned about the amount of taxes paid by the wealthy he should use this simple form (https://www.pay.gov/paygov/forms/formInstance.html?agencyFor...) to set an example.
Of course "efficiently" depends completely on what property you're trying to optimize for. Individuals work for themselves, government (theoretically) works for the people. It is not a given that "the people" will be more efficient for all such properties.