skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give me a break. Republicans are anti-public health care because public care sets in motion a process that moves care decisions into federal bureaucracies, which is absolutely a problem that Canada and the UK have.

Also, health care is ineluctably two things: a vital necessity and a commercial service. With a single payer, the commercial service objective is warped: patients and doctors are motivated to make care decisions that are inefficient or even harmful, and customer service or premium care for people who want it is eliminated.

Finally, from a philosophical perspective, single-payer implies that the government sets rates for care. Health care is not a natural resource; we don't sell land rights to extract health care to people who drill for it. Doctors spend years and years driving themselves into debt to become care providers, and drug companies sink billions into research for pharmaceuticals. The market for health services is fucking gigantic. It is legitimately daunting to consider replacing that market with a command economy!

I am pro-public-option. But don't pretend that Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and people who understand health care economics are crazy or corrupted for opposing single-payer.
It took me two minutes to finally parse out that headline. It sounds like an awful SAT sample question.
average wait time in Canada for an endoscopy is 9 months

Sounds like a great way to die from esophageal cancer.
Wouldn't you need less syntax than C has and homoiconicity to be able to have a macro system like lisp?

Isn't this the main reason why the C preprocessor couldn't become as powerful as LISP macros?
"Socialist" is a bad term for what we have. The insured do pay for the uninsured (mostly via taxes), but the uninsured don't get free rides: the system we have bankrupts them, often repeatedly, when they have health problems.
Since the US acts as a safety valve for Canada (look at the number of Canadians getting treatment in the US) and the USA's version of public health care for a small subset of the population is a disaster (google: don't get sick after june), I would much rather we pick some solutions other than public health care.

I really wish the US had started with better Health Savings Accounts, Catastrophic Insurance[1], tort reform, and reforming how we pay doctors (Medicaid is having problems with new doctors not accepting it). Moving on from there would have been better.

[1 - edit] 100% paid for a cost over some figure like $50,000 - cannot remember url of proposal
Fish: Can a command-line shell be Mac-like?
I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around skill sets, or industry circles, or knowledge bases. Essentially, the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me.

This is not necessarily our choice. But the economy and the job market are a lot more fluid -- sometimes for good, sometimes for bad -- than they were in the past. Even if someone wanted to settle into one company for the long haul, that's not only unlikely, but perhaps even highly improbable. The company itself is likely to be changing and reorganizing at a pace as constant and rapid as its market.

The old tradeoff between BigCorp and Startups used to be that Startups were riskier and more exciting, whereas BigCorp was slower, a bit more boring, but highly stable. The stability has fallen out of that equation to a large degree. These days it's a choice between relative degrees of comfort and risk, rather than absolute degrees thereof.

Again, much of this is market driven. There are startlingly few companies, big or small, that look anything like what they did five or ten years ago. It's a safe bet that they won't look the way they do today in another five or ten years. Some people thrive in this sort of environment, and those people would probably call it "dynamic." Others hate it, and they'd call it "unstable." Both would probably have to admit, one way or the other, that it's not as easy.
The Pebble smartwatch (hands-on)
Threading is one way to parallelize software. Scalability requirements are finite, therefore required hardware is, too.
You haven't even mentioned the fact that people without insurance are forced to use the most expensive services (and then go bankrupt and not pay) because that's the only kind they can get.
The reason Republicans are not for single payer healthcare is because it will require raising taxes to pay for, not because they want to immobilize labor.
This sort of information is interesting and entertaining, but not exactly something you must have.

It's always a better idea to give away the information for free, then use alternative revenue streams.
Thank you so much for that link!. I'd been meaning to check out Seesaw, and it really lives up to its promise of making Java GUI's less painful.
Thanks guys... Mixamo looks pretty good, bookmarked for future use.
A board like the Pi is defined by these attributes (order irrelevant):

Price

Performance

Exposed I/O

Device Size

Community Size

I don't know of any board that beats the Pi on more than 3 of these attributes.

The allwinner sticks you mentioned are comparably priced, but have a smaller development community and very limited I/O. If all you want is a little media player, I think they are a good choice though.
Though only something like 800,000 actually live in SF.
Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists' Disagreement About the Nature of Reality
This is exactly why a public system would help. Because the amount you pay for healthcare is scaled to your ability (via progressive taxes). Buying a private plan is not.

To see why this matters, imagine embarking on your "conquer the world" startup. You've saved up enough money for 12 months of runway. In a public system you are making 0 dollars and thus won't be taxed. However you will still have full health care. In a private system you will need to pair a fairly substantial amount (but probably not too much more than the amount of taxes that would go to healthcare in a public system) to receive coverage. You now have the following consquences: a) less runway or, b) more time saving up to get an equivalent amount of runway or, c) not having coverage and praying nothing goes wrong d) you just don't pursue your idea because it would be too hard.

Then, in a public system, when your startup succeeds and you make 10 million, you are taxed progressively on that money so as to fund the next hungry young graduate with a dream and a compiler.

I think it is pretty clear that the public system allows for more risk-taking. It is also important to note from your own example that private insurance is pretty expensive unless you are young, single, and without kids. This eliminates a huge swath of the population, all of whom might have different and awesome ideas. We bemoan the lack of gender and racial diversity in the computer field, but I think that the lack of age, lifestyle diversity in start-ups is just as important an issue.
Would that mean that they would send the patients back home unless they can provably identify some issue? (This has happened to me a few times (with the issue re-discovered at a later point), though I have never been with Kaiser.)
Does anything legally tie your optional health insurance to your employment in Canada and legally prohibit Australian employers from providing private health insurance, or is that simply the way the two markets have developed?
God damn health care is like a boondoggle of epic proportions. Finding healthcare should be as easy as looking up a favorite restaurant and reading the reviews.

Is there anyway to FIX this?
Would it be fair to say that if Arc had more success when you first released it that you would have been less willing to let the effort die? If so then the full analysis could still have merit.
Hadoop Open Air Cluster - Heat & Dust issues?
+1 carry a 3G dongle in case you need Internet on your laptop during power breakdowns.
You know, they're both sold in packages that are a pound.

Some are /4s some are /6s and some are /8s.
So for the rest of us who may not love the need for passports and drivers licenses but are overall fine with it, it seems RFID school badges might be just fine.
You're making an extremely vague but bombastic claim here. I don't think you're intentionally trolling, but it operates on a very similar level.

What does this mean in practical terms? What are you specifically criticizing? It's obvious that you're taking some kind of dig at functional programming, but what is the actual critique or logical argument you're attempting to make here? It is very unclear.
I run 20-30 miles/wk, and have a very different take on this than bialecki -- I find when to rotate my shoes really problematic. Explanation: I log every single workout and know exactly how many miles I run per week, but the issue is that I actively rotate between 2-3 pairs of shoes (one of my previous running coaches once told me that you should never run in the same pair of shoes back to back, and rotating has worked very well to help me avoid injury). In 2012, I ran around 1000 miles, but I honestly have very little idea what the distribution of the miles was between my shoes (keeping in mind that I might wear one pair for a 10 mile distance run, and another for a 3 mile track workout). Looking at the wear on the soles generally helps, but this method is crude at most.

Thus, for the runner who has one pair of shoes and logs their workouts, I agree that this device has little if no use. For someone like me, I would appreciate a solution where I could attach this to each pair and "set and forget it". A $15 or below price point is an attractive solution, especially if these devices have a long life (multi-year).
"Variable-length arrays, alone, would save a tremendous amount of time and energy"

That is, until you overflow the stack with no way to know if that's going to happen and no way to recover if it does.
The Facebook API is hugely varied and wide, so I'm guessing they want to try it with simpler APIs first before going after something huge like FB or Twitter (which is complicated by OAuth).
Sure, so did I, but then I read the article.
"If you understood pointers well enough, you would see Linus's version as more readable"

Sounds like an argument for not using C in the first place. If you need to understand pointers so well that the code presented in this article looks readable just to write a clean implementation of remove_if, your language is seriously lacking in expressiveness.

Data structures are best reasoned about abstractly. A linked list is either null or a pair [data, next] where next is a linked list. remove_if(list, fn) returns null if list is null; if list is [data, next], remove_if returns next if fn(data) is true, otherwise [data, remove_if(next)]. These definitions are much easier to understand than code with two levels of indirection; they are also easily restated as code, without requiring so many levels of pointers.

To put it another way, the shorter the transition between a natural language definition of a data structure/operation and the source code, the better. Since it is almost never the case that a natural definition will involve pointers, pointers should be used sparingly in an implementation. Pointers are unintuitive, easy to make mistakes with, and have been the source of most of the serious bugs we have dealt with over the past few decades; when I see the Linux kernel panic, it is usually because of a problem with a pointer.

I would rather see a few extra lines of code that show that a programmer took the time to think about what they were doing than a "clever trick" that is hard to reason about and which is probably hiding some subtle bug.
Announcing Designer News
I remember really struggling with cross-domain AJAX requests. I wish they'd talked about that.

Also, its quite likely that one would be using jQuery (or some other lib.) to do all of this in practice.
It was nice of them to provide an additional back button.
I'd pay for it if was curated, but not in the current state.
If you absolutely need server stuff, Tahoe-LAFS [0] looks good. The mailing list is great[1-2]. An interesting service uses it, Least Authority[3] offers Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3[4]. It runs for free on Dropbox, too[5].

"Tahoe-LAFS is a Free and Open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, including preservation of your privacy and security."[0]

TL,DR: Storage nodes can't decrypt your data, so you don't have to trust them.

[0] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

[1] https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev

[2] https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2012-December/thr...

[3] https://leastauthority.com/

[4] https://leastauthority.com/howtoconfigure/

[5] https://tahoe-lafs.org/~marlowe/TWN27.html (mid-page)

(no affil.)
It does in some areas though. E.g. you have provisions like this one from the housing act, talking about when tenancies can be automatically transferred, on the death of one spouse, to the other one:

"a person who was living with the tenant as his or her wife or husband shall be treated as the tenant’s spouse, and a person who was living with the tenant as if they were civil partners shall be treated as the tenant's civil partner"

(s. 17(4) Housing Act 1988 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/50/part/I/chapter/I... )

(Interestingly, an identical provision in another act - but with only the wife/husband language, as this was before civil partnerships - was used by the courts to give a similar benefit to a surviving member of a gay couple, using the non-discrimination provisions of the Human Rights Act to interpret the provision broadly to include gay couples living as partners (Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza)).
Facebook Back Above $30
You don't need to know anything about java to learn and use Clojure.
I really like kippt too, but I think the public follow, sharing features are overrated while the bookmarking features are what I really find useful
Show HN: Hacker Weekly - Curated HN posts & comments delivered to your email
Reminds me of setting up a dish for DirecTV. Receiver (thru stereo) beeps loudly, frequency changing via signal strength, while someone points it on the roof.
> SF was, for a time, the capital of California

Everywhere was, for a time, the capital of California...
@h2s that is getting into the nitty gritty, nicely said. One and only life, easy to forget while coding away -- even if you love what you do, it's going to end, badly, as for as continuation is concerned.

We're wired into thinking that a blip in time (this body/mind) will Energizer-Bunny-like just keep on going and going.

Thinking otherwise brings the doubt: why sit in front of these screens everyday? How utterly pointless it all is! And yet, it seems we must do something, or...

Cheers ;-)
Well, "Lisp" is a language family rather than a specific language. Although it's culturally drawn toward functional programming, Common Lisp is more or less an imperative language with first-class functions, much like Python is. Its designers chose this approach because they wanted it to be a "big tent" language that imposes few opinions on the programmer. Other Lisps like Clojure and Racket went in a different direction.
Getshitdone.me
Basically it looks like YouTube is too scared of lawsuits to acknowledge any fair use rights exist at all. Either you agree with ads, or your content is getting removed, the whole appeals process may work only if the content is not actually copyrighted, but is completely useless for fair use grounds as claimant can just repeat their claim of copyright ownership (which is true) and have it deleted anyway.
Futures and Promises in Scala 2.10.x
On the contrary.

As a user of a service the client is the only piece that I really care about wrt data security. If I can verify that the client isn't secretly uploading encryption keys to the server while claiming to encrypt my data, it's a massive win for transparency.

The server is a just an abstracted hard disk. Why would I care how it is implemented?
First steps with `futures` in Scala
The title is wrongly placed, its not inside-out reversal, but only a marginal workforce is now being hired in the US itself, with a Indian heart, this model is still better than whole-sum US (put a european country here) owned center as:

- The TCS still has Indian Top Level Executives, overseeing things from India, who take home a comparatively smaller amount of remuneration compared to US based peers only, backed by the fact that cost of living in US, is still a lot higher compared to cost of living in India.

- Moreover due to growing nationalistic movement in US over outsourcing, this is the best way, at cost of 1-20 top level jobs, 200-1000 jobs are secured per such center.

ofcourse, lastly the margin is greater for these Indian IT giants based on the appreciation in value of US Dollar in last 1-2 years.

it was 43-45 Rs for 1 dollar in 2007-08, it is now up to 55-58, after coming down from 60-63 level few months back.

India of course have its own set of problems due to it as well, as we have to import a lot of petroleum in US dollars.
There are zero (0) responsible parents that would be OK with a school that told them it "wasn't their problem" to know where students were from the point they get on the school bus at 8:30AM to the point they get off it a 3:30PM. If a 25 cent computer chip embedded in a badge helps the school do that more reliably, all arguing against the badge tells me is that you're not a parent --- or that you, like these crazy people, are terrified of all technology.
Total BS.

Have any figures to support your first point? Here's CIGNA: http://yhoo.it/TLkvyd increase in Net Income: 2010 - 3.3%, 2011 - (1.3%)

>the more they will be able to dictate our choices

Private companies can't force you do to anything, only government can do that. http://bit.ly/Q4lj1s http://nbcnews.to/rK90ox

>government control is that we actually have some say in how the government controls us because at the end of the day we control the government.

That was a joke right?

As it is there is a shortage of nurses and doctors. Partly because it costs a lot of money and effort to enter that profession. How many people will be motivated to go that direction if they'll be slaves to government decree? It will take some time, but the effect of government controlled healthcare will be a race to the bottom.

Also, the profit motive is what keeps costs down and service levels high. The less regulated an industry is, the better the service and products are available to consumers who now have choice.
I hope they take this event as motivation to fix a few issues with skype.

1) Send messages to offline contacts. If they try to replace a messenger application this is a must. So far I always thought this isnt a wanted feature as skype is mainly thought of as a video chat application.\

2) Read/Unread messages. Syncing which messages are read/unread over multiple devices doesnt work at all. If I have a couple of conversations on one pc and i later turn on my laptop, I drown in all the skype new message notifications. Plus there is some weird behaviour here sometimes with old messages. Few days ago I got a new message notification for something I received at least a year ago and havent looked at since.
I ordered mine with an SD card, a clear plastic case, micro-usb and hdmi cables and a usb power adapter.
> My premiums go up by double digit percentages every year because "costs" keep increasing, but at the same time, insurers' profits go up by double digit percentages every year.

The raw profit values in dollars? If the costs go up 20%, the premiums go up 20%, and the profits go up 20% all together I'm not going to cry foul. The problem is the fact that costs are going up because of bad management.

> at the end of the day we control the government

You also control which insurance company you use. You have even more power; think about how hard it is to switch countries.

> downsides of a private health care system outweigh the downsides of a public health care system

I agree there, at least when it comes to basic care.
1) How efficient is Medicare now? Private healthcare will always be an option. The existing private system would still be very good, and very competitive.

2) You can say the same for private industry.

3) The downsides are taxes. Expand the existing government payer system with minimal logistic cost. Remove the tax burden from employees (or employers passing it on to same) and watch the economy flourish. The biggest risk is to private insurance, which will never fully recover. Some may opt for the nonprofit model.
Why a cheaper iPhone model makes economic sense
The problem is not so much big companies wanting to lock in employees as the political nightmare of ending a tax-break. Right now, people who get employer based health care get a tax break: their compensation used to pay for health insurance doesn't get taxed. The more money you make, the more valuable that tax break is. People with employer based health care tend to be richer than people without. Every year, the government foregoes $80 billion in tax revenue by refusing to tax employer provided health benefits, and most of that money goes to middle and upper-middle class workers.

Congress isn't going to threaten an $80 billion/year tax cut that is almost entirely consumed by middle and upper middle class professionals.
Wish I'd seen this a bit earlier. I read a great article today from Leo Babauta from Zen Habits on essentially the same topic.

Set a value system, and stick to it. That's exactly what this author is encouraging. I think it's unfortunate that the context the author chose to illustrate the point is distracting to many, but it doesn't change the validity of his message.

Check out the article from Leo here at Zen Habits: http://zenhabits.net/12rules/
So certain people point guns at everybody else to extract money and pay for health care. It suddenly diminishes motivation to stay healthy and we need even more guns pointing to some other people so some third category of people would feel that motivation has been justly restored and everybody is moving towards brighter future.

And please don't even start with an argument that "you can go away if you don't like it". It is you, not me, have to prove that some people have a right to point a gun at us while we cannot do the same towards them. Either that, or there is no difference between initiation of force and self-defense, but then it does not prove why somebody has an exclusive right to use guns.

To those who are going to downvote me: are you able to come with a valid argument why it is me, not people with guns should prove a position before taking action?
> Is it really so easy to outlaw an arbitrary product?

Like hemp and alcohol?
Verizon announces best quarter ever with 9.8 million smartphone activations
What startups outside the US need to know about health insurance in 2013: nothing.
none, why fix whats not broken? its a working model right now, so why pay for it? It will become Harvard Business Review if it would cost even a penny a year.
I don't know about Canada, but I believe in Australia it's illegal for an employer to have anything to do with your health care.
Apple Refuses To Make The One Mobile Device Taking Over The World
Working on it. There are some specific challenges around the way the Facebook SDK for JavaScript works in this context, but we'll get there.