skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-- Peter the Hermit, A.D. 1274
No, the point is - flood insurance (on a floodplain) is so expensive people simply don't get it. You can say people should leave if they can't afford it, or they should suck it up and buy it, but it's not going to happen. The USA has the same problem - you couldn't get people to move from New Orleans (until they were actually washed away), San Francisco (an earthquake zone) or Seattle (there's a massive tsunami waiting to go off there any time in the next millennia).

People are stupid. They settle in dangerous areas, then the government will be forced to bail them out. It's not 100% efficient, but the alternatives (letting people suffer, or draconian regulations like compulsory flood insurance or strict zoning laws) aren't politically acceptable. And the costs of the government insuring people just isn't so high that it's completely unacceptable - especially when you consider the economic cost of them not covering people (e.g. homeless people clogging up emergency rooms because they couldn't get their cough looked at when it was simply a mild case of pneumonia).
Vocabulary of Coffee Bars
Why Average Latency Is a Terrible Way To Track Website Performance
Those are great points (especially the market-indicator fund which does the work for you). That's still the kind of thing which you would need to bootstrap enough of a nest egg to protect against the difference in risk between little ol' me and the Big Insurance Co.

Once you have enough money to protect yourself against one early disaster then you could shift over completely to saving up for self-insurance. I'm not there yet though :) I suppose it's like they say, you need to have money to make money.
My favorite: "need cups?"
This makes sense for the ubuntu phone coming out.
Simple.

I go to the GP and complain about my chronic backaches. Physical therapy doesn't work, so I need to talk to a neurosurgeon, whose time is worth about $500/hr.

After getting an MRI for $1,000 and paying a radiologist $1,250 to interpret it, it turns out that one of my disks are ruptured, and I am going to require a spinal fusion.

That's a 6-hour surgery that costs about $100k. I make $50k per year. Now what? Do I bankrupt my family, or persevere until I'm rendered paralyzed and on the dole, or buy insurance to cover this sort of event?
It's an analogy. If you accept the premise that the market for health insurance has similar properties to the market for flood insurance, namely that the information about who needs it is readily available, then those two markets are broken in similar ways.

I do get what you are saying though. Why do we let people live in flood plains when they can't afford to have their homes be destroyed? In other words, if they don't have the means to self-insure.

Well, we could have the government regulate flood plains and forbid anybody from building homes there. But there are already homes there, so that ship has sailed. So basically, the government, representing the collective will of the people, has decided that it won't let people's lives be destroyed, even if they decide to live in a risky area.

If you apply this logic to health insurance, there are people who are uninsurable in exactly the same way as having a house in a flood plain makes you uninsurable. If you have cancer already, no insurance company will insure you against cancer. There's no chance of you net having cancer. The costs are known. Asking for insurance is like trying to get something for free.

But as a society we probably don't want these people to just die because they aren't insured. So we have to all agree to some solution that doesn't depend on private insurance.
Appoint Susan Crawford as FCC Chairman
The actual list: http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/h...

It is interesting to note that 100% of the apps listed are games with wakelocks. While some may argue that this is necessary for games, I counter that your game should pause after a period of inactivity and allow the device to sleep. Just because your app is a console port does not mean it is running on a console.

Kudos to Verizon for naming and shaming.
U.S. said to be target of massive cyber-espionage campaign
Right now source mapping is only working between uncompressed/combined JavaScript to compressed/uncombined JavaScript

Which was exactly my point. The tools for targeting javascript from other languages are non-existent at the moment, never mind mature enough that I would want to rely on them in production.

As an aside, am I the only person who reads things like this and is filled with a sense of foreboding:

The spec mentions cross site script inclusion issues that could arise from the consumption of a source map. To mitigate this it's recommended that you prepend the first line of your source map with ")]}" to deliberately invalidate JavaScript so a syntax error will be thrown.
Strange. It's an interesting story, not just regarding the mission and the nature of our elite forces, but of bureaucracy.
Would love HN wisdom!
We're using Twitter to build an NLP app, and everyday we're wondering if they will just pull the plug on us.
We have a friend at Twitter in Ops: ask permission or forgiveness?
You can move away from flood risk, you cannot move away from an unlucky mutation. So covering the former from public money feels less justified than the latter, at least from the veil of ignorance point of view.
IBM whitepaper: Seeding clouds on Power Systems
NERILY appears to be closed source and only usable on a subscription pricing model. It appears to be similar to zemanta.com - unless I am mistaken and this is also available as a library?
Car companies attempted to void warranties if -any- work was done by not the dealer, effectively locking buyers in to the dealership as their only source of repairs. Congress had to pass a law telling them they weren't allowed to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_... is a good place to start.
Study uses grins and frowns to predict online game hits
I used to build structured credit risk models at JPMorgan and other banks. A few observations:

- Excel models are usually built on a pre-existing template, probably created by someone else. Any errors/hidden assumptions carries through. This is he biggest source of errors.

- Any large model usually has a tab devoted to reference tables and assumptions based on external sources, a la dependency injection. Usually you have to use static numbers since you need to email the model around (you don't want your boss seeing a bunch of #NAs due to missing links. Keeping this data updated is another huge source of errors.

- A sanity check is your best defense. I'm positive that every CDO model I've ever built has contained at least one error, just like every large software application has at least one bug. The difference is that models have fewer output parameters, which allows you spot incongruities more easily.

- People who use big Excel models are not software engineers and will never be. In my opinion, solutions that implement concepts like testing, diffs, commits, etc are a waste of time, because it creates extra work and learning curve.
Parallel.js: A tiny javascript library for parallel computing
Using cURL with multibyte domain names
New Microscopy System Allows Scientists To Look Inside Living Cells Without Dyes
Venture Hacks blog is back? Oh... I hope so!
> They accidentally deployed a test trading partner for their real trading app to the real world.

Do you have a citation for this? I saw a lot of speculation at the time but nothing that was ever corroborated.
What ever happened to progressive enhancement?

None of these elements work with Javascript disabled. Would sure be great to support simple clients and use Javascript features only to enhance the experience.

So many sites are becoming unusable without Javascript for seemingly very little benefit
The article doesn't say anything about how the law is taking shape, it just repeats criticisms of it.
A Map of the Geographic Structure of Wikipedia Topics
Because then anyone who gets unlucky dies from not being able to afford the exorbitant prices of catastrophic health care, which will never go down enough to be "affordable" to anyone who isn't rich.
Networks of probability
Sunk: The Incredible Story of the HMS Bounty
How Social Media Infiltrated the Super Bowl
Have you ever used Google Scholar? When I did, even if it indexed paywalled articles it didn't offer direct links to it (would have made my job easier at the time, trust me).

It's hard to hold Google up as a paragon of "doing the right thing" IP infringment when they'll auto-remove videos from YouTube based just on their similarity to other videos that have been flagged inappropriately for copyright violation.
The slumlord business model works because he's raking in guaranteed payments from the government (60-75% of those apartments are directly subsidized), and he doesn't give a shit about the buildings.

So his liability is basically limited to shoring the place up enough so that the Social Services/Public Housing people will continue writing checks, and covering the costs of emergency demolition when the house burns or falls in.
I thought he was gonna ask for a job.
This thought has been in my head ever since I read this HN comment last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5199006

To everyone saying that this has been tried and failed with Java Applets / Silverlight / Flash: what those technologies did was try to shoehorn app-like environments into the browser, which of course annoyed users because it broke all kinds of expectations when compared to visiting regular HTML pages.

What I (and I think, the OP) have in mind is an actual 2nd "browser". A different standalone app. I envision something where "webapp" authors can post manifests at URL endpoints which define the UI and behavior (not unlike styling in Android), and this 2nd browser will "render" the webapp using native widgets and controls. This brings with it a number of things:

- OMG! The basic keyboard shortcuts all my other native apps have are now available, instead of some poorly hacked-together javascript-detected version
- Rich user interaction with the app and the controls is now a first-class citizen - no more weird highlighting of the entire page, or unexpected popping-up and disappearing of elements on misclicks
- Right click can actually be used, without hacks!
- Opening a new "window" with a new app actually creates an OS-level window with the icon and name being the webapp's favicon - furthering the notion that you're actually using an app and not visiting a website.
- It still retains the main advantages of the web - it's cross-platform and ubiquitous (and users don't have to go through the hassle of explicitly installing and updating native apps)
- I'm sure developing highly interactive webapps for this platform would be a lot simpler, more fundamentally sound, and more enjoyable than the huge hack that is HTML5/AJAX now
- etc etc

It would really surprise me if nobody has thought through this idea in more detail than me, or if there isn't someone out there working on something like this already...

(EDIT: formatting)
If only it were that easy to shift away from facebook...

The ability to properly adblock is actually a genuine factor that could make my next mobile something other than an iPhone
One of my friends does research on this for another of the big carriers, and has told me some war stories.

* No one caches, or they cache really badly. They've seen 20-30% reductions in battery usage from implementing a caching scheme from one version to the next. His theory is that they're coming from the web world, where caching is baked in.

* One app killed the battery by waking up the radios every 2 minutes to check for updated scores, sending a few bytes each time. Network traffic, in aggregate, was very small, but it just killed the batteries.
I threw away my Coherent manual during my last move. It was as thick as a big city phone book and was my goto Unix manual for years.

According to this it was over 1347 pages long: http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php
How do these rules get enacted with no public discussion and no public debate. The effect of this ruling is to make criminals of thousands or tens of thousands of US citizens who purchased a phone. This should not happen without transparency. Here is another petition asking for an investigation.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/investigate-librar...
Google celebrates moonshot thinking
Clearly some people suffer more from it than others. The question is, is it more like being short, which no one seems to think requires intervention, or like being nearsighted, which everyone does.
An SEO consultant complaining about Google's frequent algo changes is like a mechanic complaining that cars break down too often.
"I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
>It's been around 2x faster than Python in most of my uses

You must have some very unusual uses for that to be true. The computer language shootout isn't perfect, but it includes a variety of uses, and python is at best 5 times slower than go on benchmarks actually written in python instead of C, and 20-30 times slower for most of them.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...

Go is in the same performance field as java, haskell, scala, lisp, C#, etc. The 2-5x slower than C group. Python is in the same field as php, perl, ruby, etc. They are 30-50x slower than C. That's a huge difference.
How To Use Social Engineering To Get Into The Super Bowl
Coding and Reasoning with Purity, Strong Types, and Monads
Java Flaw Repair Email Camouflages Crafty New Malware Attac
Surely that is an almost impossible feat to pull off

1. $NEXTBIGTHING is tiny and cannot be distinguished from the noise

2. $NEXTBIGTHING is going to be the next big thing, but only a few people can realise this

3. $NEXTBIGTHING is spreading like wildfire - the owners of $NEXTBIGTHING could take 400m from you, or they could take 20m in VC and become the next rovio.

The time period between 1. and 3. is probably tiny compared to the time it takes to broker a 400M dollar deal
Was Shatner's face added to SRS sarcastically? Or were they promoting him?
This is great, but I'm not sure if it's actually any less complicated than installing DD-WRT or Tomato.
5 Simple Ways to Balance Your Body and Mind
Use ThreeBar to Help Charity
Impose Draconian data caps and try to con your users into leaving their unlimited data plans. Then, call apps out for using too much data.

Thanks, Verizon.
exactly, just want to know if he is making an insightful geo-political theory on interactions between groups, or if it is hagbard celine and the yellow submarine.
I think they made at least one error: Need for Speed: Most Wanted was not developed by Rovio.

Also of interest is that none of the streaming radio services suffered in their rather proprietary ranking: http://support.verizonwireless.com/information/app_ranking/i...
If I was feeling uncharitable, I would say it's a bit like a burglar complaining that the homeowner keeps installing better locks.
I am sure that there are cases in which people are careless despite great financial risk. But there are also many cases of people being careless as a direct result of insurance coverage. This is most obvious in insurance fraud, where people actually intentionally damage their property in order to get a payout. But more commonly, people simply opt not to pay for garage parking because they have theft insurance on their car or motorcycle.
I would worry that a fair market value for healthcare would still be more than most people could afford. The question is, would it be less out of pocket or more than with insurance, which is probably a vague question and one I have no ability to attempt answering. Anecdotally, though, I've found that while the squeeze of my employer's health plan was difficult, having to pay the entire cost of my appendectomy would've been nigh impossible. I can only imagine how much my mother with COPD would have to pay out of pocket.
Betting Odds on Next Pope
Any website using AngularJS already won't work with JS disabled. These are web "apps", not web sites. Therefore there is no need for progressive enhancement in the plugins used if that is what you meant. If you meant AngularJS altogether, it depends on your user base.
I think you're missing the point. The reason why it would cost you $100k is twofold: right now out of pocket expenses are deliberately much, much higher to compensate doctors and medical professionals for nonpayments, and medical professionals have no problem gouging their prices for the insurance companies, or using more-expensive-than necessary procedures for the benefit of patients (because after all, we have a massive principal agent problem). Not to mention that insurance encourages wasteful consumption, decimates competition, and misaligns incentives. And the fact that most people get insurance through their place of work such that they are less mobile and less able to negotiate higher pay just makes the situation more bitter.

My solution is to let the price of medicine float with demand and supply, like any other commodity, where it would lower in price with competition and neuter the influence of health insurance lobbyists.

Also, health is always going to be the sort of profession where the best treatment is too expensive for more people to afford. That's just a natural result of innovation. Every new technology--even those we take for granted today--were too expensive for most people to afford when they were introduced. The way that prices come down for these things is through demand and competition, not through government mandates, which provide no incentive to lower prices (another principal agent problem).
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I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA
More like an arsonist complaining about updates to building code.
Private health insurance works fine for a large percentage of the U.S. population. It's worked well for 3 generations of my family, for example, and there is plenty of data that shows similar successes for many millions of other people.

There are situations where it does not work well, and it is appropriate that the government steps into those situations. The U.S. government already does this, with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Just like they provide flood insurance to the few people who need it.

But neither the U.S., nor Canada, have stepped in to take over the entire homeowner insurance market. Why not? Because it works well enough the way it is. There's no need.

Likewise, replacing the entire private U.S. health insurance industry with government-run single payer is not needed. It would be hugely risky, but with little marginal benefit for those who would be most affected.
Square's harassment scandal shows dangers of startup culture, experts say
You can certainly choose not to smoke, and to exercise, and to take care of yourself in general. We do introduce a principal agent problem into the mix when we start letting people get their healthcare paid for by other people.
As I noted above, after the 1957 Hurricane in Toronto, the city appropriated the floodplains. There was no benefit to rebuilding when people could easily be relocated.

The trouble with Winnipeg is that it's an entire city. It's an economic engine that was built on a river at the time when river commerce was vital. Moving the entire city is infeasible at this point in time, so the givernment assumes some of the flood risk and mitigates some of it with civic projects.
The Foundation page is built using itself. There are four buttons above the fold (download, watch on gw, follow, navbar download).

In fact that's more than Bootstrap shows you. If you discount the big download button in the home page, you have to guess it's in 'Base CSS' (not Components) and navigate a few miles down.

Anyway, all this rationalization on why everyone uses bootstrap is also funny. Who could imagine a CSS framework would get people so defensive?
Example of real-time maps with CartoDB: Barcelona traffic
This is a straw man. The point of the article is health insurance, and no one chooses to break their leg, get burned in a fire, or develop cancer.

But I'll take you up on it anyway, because it's still BS. How about the people in tornado alley? Or hurricane alley? Or everyone in California with all those earthquakes? Or mudslides or forest fires or or or... can you tell me no one in your state/province/whatever has ever had a natural disaster destroy their home?
Hey, I worked for an insurance company for five years or so. Nice try, but sloppy. Flood insurance, which is the main thing you talk about, isn't health insurance. Car insurance, at least in the U.S., is fundamentally different from both health insurance and homeowners insurance. Your remarks prompted me to finally start a stub on the topic, something I have wanted to write about for a long time. Thank you for the inspiration. If I wind up mentioning your piece, and possibly critiquing it, hopefully you can feel flattered rather than attacked.
Goldstein on Gelt - The follow up interview with Gail Reynolds
And what about the (very common) scenario where person A actually contracts an expensive disease based on environmental factors that are largely out of their control and person B lucks out with great genes and has no significant health issues.

I don't think most people have a problem with personal responsibility in this context (theoretically). But the healthcare debate is SO much more complicated than that.
Much of the EU is unelected and unaccountable as compared to national governments. It's more a bureaucracy than a legislature. I don't want to pass too much judgement since I am far from an EU scholar, but tat unaccountability seems to remove an incentive to learn about the processes, since you will have less of an opportunity to change it.
I've used Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, Visual Slickedit, Sublime Text 2, and JetBrains' IDEs. For C++, Slickedit is king, followed closely by Eclipse, but soon I think AppCode will give them both a run for their money. For all other mainstream languages JetBrains' products win hands down. For the rest either Emacs, Vim, or ST2 will do.

The difference between using a real IDE and an editor with hacked IDE extensions is like the difference between hunting with a rifle and hunting with a bow and arrow. If you're skilled enough, both will work. If you're set in your ways you may prefer the bow, and the bow offers a more primal experience and requires more dedication. The bow is certainly more badass. But the rifle just boosts your productivity immensely.

The one downside of IDEs is that they can encourage a bit of sloppiness. The tool automates so much you want it to automate it all, but there is still no substitute for a good working memory and careful study and thought.
The implication in your wording is that a lot of people who live outside the flood plain are compensating people living in Winnipeg for their flood damage, but the way I read it, the citizens of the province of Manitoba are doing the compensating. Since over half the population of Manitoba lives in Winnipeg, it's not quite the black-and-white "taxes are theft!" scenario your wording makes it sound like.
Whoa, that surprised me!

I hope people can get interesting information, Bill Gates III is seemly a interesting character.
That's the interior of the car, which is effectively a greenhouse.

You don't put the battery packs on the inside of the car any more than you'd put the fuel tank on the inside. Typical placements are underneath the vehicle, arguably the coolest area possible. This is where the Tesla model S places the pack, as does the Fisker Karma, and this is also where the old ('97-'03) RAV4 EV placed the NiMH pack.
It's more like new cars being introduced without service manuals, forcing the mechanic to continually figure out how to fix them.
I love this site idea. As a freelance web developer in the past, I experienced first hand the world of these types of clients. I think a site like this is a great way to address the needs of this type of client.