skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> had to wait YEARS for their number to be called.

They could have paid and gone privvate at any time. While wait lists were terrible some time ago they have got a lot better. Since year 2000 wait lists have been consistantly targetted for action by a variety of governments. There are some dodgy actions by some hospitals, but these are called out as dodgy and people take action to prevent it. Patients have maximum wait times listed in national documentation.

> They also limit the availability to the best medications and procedures to keep costs down.

I'm not sure what your point is. Imagine A and B, where A is shown to work effectively and B isn't. Which would you want? In this situation I'm glad that people have a responsibility to evaluate the research to weed out very expensive and inefficient medication and proceedures (and that's really what they're doing. They stop a small number of very expensive and ineffective meds; they don't just allow a small number of cheap meds.)

> Also the quality is also quite poor

How are you measuring quality?

> hundreds of people in the UK have died of dehydration in the hospital because the staff forgot to give them water.

Hundreds sounds too high. Do you have a cite for that please? (Note that the Mirror or the Mail will cause much mirth and laughter and people will then ignore anything else you say.)

While we're talking about deaths from incompetence: Yes, it happens. Yes, it kills distressing many people. It also happens in the US. Medical error is the 3rd biggest cause of death in the US. About 7,000 people die each year in the US because clinicians make a mistake with the medication. About 12,000 people die from unnecessary surgery. About 20,000 die from other errors. Nosocomial (Hospital aquired) infection kills another 80,000 people in the US. About 100,000 people get the right quantity of the right meds, but die from side-effect complications.

There are some things US health care does better. But the UK has better outcomes for some things. We also spend less money on our healthcare than the US.

(http://www.nursingtimes.net/a-comparison-of-british-and-us-m...)
Why Google Glass is the Worst Surveillance Device
He said reintroduce market forces, not remove all regulations.

I'm a pretty big fan of the swiss model, I think it contains the best of both worlds:

You're forced to buy a certified policy with a certain (broad) coverage. If the cost of such a policy exceeds 8% of your annual income, government makes up the rest.

Both insurers and providers are regulated heavily for quality control, but compete freely for their business.

The result is a generally consumer driver system, as opposed to an insurer driven (US) or state-bureaucracy driven (most of Europe) model.
Why would you assume or imagine when you have the single biggest source of information in the world at your fingertips?

From http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&#... we learn that:

- Total giving to charitable organizations was $298.42 billion in 2011 (about 2% of GDP). This is an increase of 4% from 2010.

- Giving by individuals (which includes bequests and family foundations) is critically important as it represents nearly 9 out of every 10 dollars donated.

- 32% of all donations, or $95.88 billion, went to religious organizations (down 1.7%). Much of these contributions can be attributed to people giving to their local place of worship. The next largest sector was education with $38.87 billion (up 4%).

- Donations were up to health charities (2.7%), to public benefit charities (4%), to arts, culture, humanities charities (4.1%), to International charities (7.6%), to human services charities (2.5%), to environmental and animal charities (4.6%).

For comparisons to Europe, check out:
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-co...

- Per capita, Americans give 3.5x than the French, 7x Germans, 14x Italians.

- Americans are 15% more likely to volunteer than the Dutch, 21% more than the Swiss, 32% more likely than the Germans.

The pattern holds true across many demographics (education, age, income).
That Silicon Mechanics stuff is obsolete and the Penguin servers don't look like OCP at all.
Finding a job in the US would be more difficult, presumably.
Not at the moment, but it's not a bad idea. Having a list features available + upcoming would be helpful to keep everyone up to date!
LOVE IT. Such a fun app man. upvote
Please send an alert when a new customer is added - even if they didn't make a payment.
For ex, if someone subscribes to a plan that has a free trial.
Stripe doesn't do this yet - so this would solve a big pain point for me.
name.com's passwords were (still are?) not encrypted. They're unsalted MySQL 4.1 PASSWORD() hashes.
"But if you're stuck on "stop people from dying from preventable diseases" or "appearing to do so", then you've implicitly ruled out market forces completely."

We are in agreement. My point is that society is stuck on this (note that I have made no value judgment in these comments myself) and until and unless that changes, market forces are implicitly ruled out.
What is the double taxation on business trips?
bmelton - thank you for your reply.

I am guessing you are not the CTO of a federal agency and are just talking rhetorically (otherwise I am very impressed with HN)

I believe federal sales and their equivalent is profitatble because it needs to be to make up for the effort !

I mostly think that there are few drop-in replacements without systems-integration. But what I am hoping to do is to start a culture of ... well paying developers rather than paying proprietary companies. I have a suspicion that a pool of government funds and a community steered openly (sort of like debian project) would allow agencies to say
if the debian-alike project acts as developer-of-last-resort we will arrange to pay for OSS devs to come in.

Still in the planning stages, but if you have any specifics please ping me

cheers
Interesting. I never considered that shady language is a purposeful thing, always assuming it's genuine mistakes by non-native speakers.
And presumably, there are nearly 10 times as many taxpayers in the US to fund such a system. Why do the absolute numbers matter? In fact, shouldn't there be better economies of scale in the larger country?
Ask HN: How should I go about selling fraud software for anti-fraud purposes?
I know someone with a PoC that can replicate a human accurately enough to defraud online rewards sites that pay users to watch ads.

How would I go about valuing this? How/who should I contact about buying the technology? Not planing on using it.
Marc Andreessen in conversation with Eric Ries
Pigs are safe from BSE, so feeding pigs pig meat has nothing to do with BSE.
> Not the number,
> more like the form,

Now that's a great start!
I wonder if the art is knowing when to go on until your breath runs out,
and when to keep it
short.
I laughed at the idea that a "Like" is equated to connecting with brands; only FB can really think that. It's cheap, shallow, and an extremely poor signal. I bet your every startup here can tell you they have walked into hundreds of sales offices; the buyer loved their product and how it could do this and this and that; but you didn't ask t hem if they would BUY it and they won't when you come back after building it. Not that the same would follow in the case of Braff's endeavor.

Financial risk!? I bet the risk is higher you incur a medical bill just thinking about how up in arms folks are about fans being able to donate direct to Braff -- the artist -- AND probably being delivered half a dozen goodies.
Riding the Momentum Created by a Cheeky Video (Dollar Shave Club)
Sorry, guys. Fixed.
People who think "throw more politicians at the problem" really frustrate me: they are a bunch of random people seeking more power for themselves.
So if the $298.42 billion donated world wide, almost half ($135 billion) went to fairly self-serving purposes (e.g. me donating to my alma mater to improve the stature of the school).
> You're missing the point that you're not paying for yourself, you have to pay for others too.

There's no way to avoid that, unless you're willing to accept that poor people get no medical treatments at all.
At least in the US, having your card number stolen is such a small deal that it hardly seems worth worrying about. Just keep an eye on your statement, which you should really be doing anyway. You don't have to pay for charges you didn't authorize. In my experience, the card issuer typically detects the fraud automatically.
Ask HN: How to sell fraud software, as anti fraud software?
Friends have developed software that is capable (but hasn't) of defrauding online rewards programs that pay users for watching videos and such like that.

How/who to contact someone about valuing this and selling it?
John McAfee Answers Questions From Slashdot Readers
Does a flat tax (with reasonable deductions) hurt anyone besides the super rich? It seems like it would solve a lot of problems and close a lot of tax loopholes. Imagine if we could nearly eliminate the IRS.
> At what point do we recognize a disorder in a child who is unnaturally compliant and obedient? No answer so far.

But if you give it a name people will start to recognize it and they will be harder to control!

Nice idea though, in theory.
I'M...ACTING!

But seriously, acting is the answer. Don't be a cold caller. Be yourself, as an actor, pretending to be a cold caller. (Actually, don't pretend to be cold caller. Pretend to be a decent, normal person.)
> How shall emergency rooms operate?

Not all emergency room decision-making happen with blood pumping out of your pulmonary artery. There are parents who take their babies to ERs, and through repeat business decide to like one better (maybe because it's cheaper, maybe because it's a bit more expensive, but never have any waiting time) than the other. There are consumer reporters who will look into why one hospital is cheaper than the other. Smart phone "Yelp for hospitals".

EDIT: Forgot the conclusion: This will drive down prices in the general case, which will also result in lower prices for the emergency case, even if in an emergency you don't have the luxury of calmly evaluating all the options.

> Also, how shall people make an initial determination on care when no diagnostics have yet to be performed?

The same way you decide which restaurant to go to before you know exactly which dish to have: Ranking by a general cost/quality scale.
Click on about on his blog. He has a link to his own goddamn LinkedIn profile right there. If he hates it so much why does have such a nicely filled out and active LinkedIn profile.
If Airbnb says that they are being paid for the service they provide, and part of that contract with their customer is to pay a property owner (like an Travel Agent), does that change things?

Would a Travel Agent be called a money transmitter?

As someone asking someone else who seems to know more about this than I, does this lawsuit have legs to stand on? [Edit: seemed to be answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5677731]
A Quantum Computer Aces Its Test
Nonsense. It works quite well pretty much everywhere in Europe. Better that in the USA, at any rate.
And get it into a Schwab account.
Well, it was also around earnings, so I wanted to wait for earnings (which turned out good) and the pop from that.
> Give me a proposal that stops poor people from dying of treatable diseases while preserving market forces, and I'll change my mind.

See my comment elsewhere on the swiss model.
The conversational internet
HNer kouiskas suggests it is a weak, unsalted hash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5677550
There's a guy on my street (SF) who does the same thing. It seems either insane or haughty to me.
Asking seriously, what's a "use"?

Launching an app is a poor metric, as there are all manner of use-external reasons why an app may be started or stopped. A timer? Perhaps, but my perception is that most folks hate feeling "on the clock". Maybe per-day, or a days-per-month ladder of some sort, to relax that feeling? Seems more complicated for the end-user and for Adobe with the only real upside for very casual users.

To some extent, a monthly subscription seems to strike a balance between an incremental usage fee (aka "use") and avoiding the complexity and psychology of timed usage.
OK, Japan then. 125 million people, universal health coverage, ranked 10th in the world by WHO (the US is ranked 38).
A Photographer Rediscovers The Crumbling Remains Of Tatooine
Ten minutes can get you much much closer than just "random" cold calling.

first, what are you selling? Probably you, your skills? You said target market? What is that? How well do you know that industry? Do you know anyone in it?

Second, what value is that to a customer? Do not choose "coding". Choose "writing code that ensures your xxx meets regulations more consitently"

Third, identify what sort of person cares about their xxx meets regulations - what are thier job titles. Are any listed in the industry blogs and magazines.

And then ...

... start by creating a blog on your target market (The FooBarFishBlog)
and call up 20 people and ask to interview them about the industry and their role in it, where they see it in 5 years, what would they most like the President to do etc.

Suddenly you will a) know some people in the industry, b) know more about the industry than you expected and c) have started networking without cold calling (selling something no one wants is crap. Everyone wants to see their name in print)

now please - tell us more - what industry, what experience do you have. The more detail you provide. the more we can help. go do !
Terrorism and organized crime are high-value targets. Wiretapping, in those cases, can literally mean placing a bug and audio or radio bug, or placing a physical tap on a landline. If you plan to spend millions on the prosecution, you can spend a few tens of thousands on bugs.
Do you think this action has any chance of any positive outcome? I.e. is there realistically any way this could produce any positive benefit for Mr. Greenspan whatsoever?
Not sure I understand what you're referring to.

0.284 * $7.5 billion = $2.13 billion

His gain, assuming a 20% jump, is about $300 million.

At market close TSLA's market cap was $6.39 billion.
It works really well in Germany with about one quarter of the population of the states. You pay about 15% of your salary split roughly 50/50 between the employee and the employer and that's basically it. You have to pay some additional money for different things - drugs (10% of the price, maximum 10,- €), hospital stay (10,- € per day, maximum 28 days) and so on. If you are unemployed, the state will pay for you. Finally you are free to opt out and get private health insurance - this may be cheaper when you earn much and are healthy but it may also turn against you.

The price of this is a very large bureaucracy regulating all this and of course costing quite some money that does not go into actual medical treatment.
(I work at Stripe)

Stripe allows US and Canadian businesses, and is in closed beta in the UK (sign up at https://stripe.com/global if you would like an invite!) We definitely want to launch in many more countries, but can't say much about timelines as yet.
Wow. This is a very impressive app. It would be great however if there was a video showing how to play and/or what you can do with it.
http://www.welivesecurity.com/2013/04/26/linuxcdorked-new-ap...

remediation:

// This program dumps the content of a shared memory block
// used by Linux/Cdorked.A into a file named httpd_cdorked_config.bin
// when the machine is infected.
//
// Some of the data is encrypted. If your server is infected and you
// would like to help, please send the httpd_cdorked_config.bin
// and your httpd executable to our lab for analysis. Thanks!
//
// Build with gcc -o dump_cdorked_config dump_cdorked_config.c
//
// Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé <leveille@eset.com>
//

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/shm.h>

#define CDORKED_SHM_SIZE (6118512)
#define CDORKED_OUTFILE "httpd_cdorked_config.bin"

int main (int argc, char argv[]) {
int maxkey, id, shmid, infected = 0;
struct shm_info shm_info;
struct shmid_ds shmds;
void cdorked_data;
FILE * outfile;

maxkey = shmctl(0, SHM_INFO, (void *) &shm_info);
for(id = 0; id <= maxkey; id++) {
shmid = shmctl(id, SHM_STAT, &shmds);
if (shmid < 0)
continue;

if(shmds.shm_segsz == CDORKED_SHM_SIZE) {
// We have a matching Cdorked memory segment
infected++;
printf("A shared memory matching Cdorked signature was found.\n");
printf("You should check your HTTP server's executable file integrity.\n");

cdorked_data = shmat(shmid, NULL, 0666);
if(cdorked_data != NULL) {
outfile = fopen(CDORKED_OUTFILE, "wb");
if(outfile == NULL) {
printf("Could not open file %s for writing.", CDORKED_OUTFILE);
}
else {
fwrite(cdorked_data, CDORKED_SHM_SIZE, 1, outfile);
fclose(outfile);

printf("The Cdorked configuration was dumped in the %s file.\n\n", CDORKED_OUTFILE);
}
}
}
}
if(infected == 0) {
printf("No shared memory matching Cdorked signature was found.\n");
printf("To further verify your server, run \"ipcs -m -p\" and look");
printf(" for a memory segments created by your http server.\n");
}
else {
printf("If you would like to help us in our research on Cdorked, ");
printf("please send the httpd_cdorked_config.bin and your httpd executable file ");
printf("to our lab for analysis at leveille@eset.com. Thanks!\n");
}
return infected;
}
I'd highly recommend checking out the linked dataset.[1] One quick observation: subtract Average Covered Charges from Average Total Payments and sort to see what procedures are most overcharged: 7 of the top 10 are "207 - RESPIRATORY SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS W VENTILATOR SUPPORT 96+ HOURS". Average overcharge among those top records is 601K. What is going on that they routinely charge 601K more than they collect?

I'm excited to see what all everyone else comes up with.

[1] http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat...
Interesting. Do you ever have clients pursuing the PT / 5-flag theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_tourist
Is there any avenue for a company who might see themselves as a victim of their competition ignoring/abusing laws for a competitive advantage?
Facebook Autoplay Ads are coming...
I have several Canadian friends and they've all told me that they never understood the price of healthcare until they had to take their dog to the vet. They all pay for it, of course, during the course of their lives, but they don't ever have to worry about not having access to it or being bankrupted for it. The medical industry hates this, of course, because it means that hospitals can't charge $2 for an aspirin that can be bought 100 to a bottle for less.
Feeding cows chicken litter isn't a big deal, it's not just chicken poo, but the uneaten or spilled food, the bedding material, and pieces of feathers. Runoff from chicken litter causes a lot of issues for rivers and streams, and it can't always be used for fertilizer. Feeding it to cows to improve their mineral uptake, it has about the same caloric value as hay, and it's higher in protein.
Baccus - Time Machine-like backup in Tcl
Thanks for the heads up, I did not notice that.
I've had similar issues. People in my group asked me to stop approving FounderDating posts because they felt it was spammy. Clearly something needs to change with their tone and overall marketing because it could be a great resource for some people with project ideas!
I agree, that's exactly the question. Well, unless we get to a situation where literally every person can receive the best treatment for every ailment, at high-quality facilities with no waiting. If we're not in that situation, then some people can't receive the best treatment for their condition, and the question is who and when.
I've noticed here and on reddit that Microsoft stories don't get much attention. Rightly so?
> At what point do we recognize a disorder in a child who is unnaturally compliant and obedient?

Typically one of the important parts of diagnosis is "does it cause a problem for the patient?"

> it is about institutional convenience.

Misdiagnosis is a serious problem. But your comment is weird. Giving someone a diagnosis is not convenient. That person is now able to get medical treatment, maybe disability benefits, maybe time off work, etc. Once you diagnose someone you have a duty to try to provide treatment. It's far more convenient to say that people do not have a mental health problem and release them.
You are right, we don't have access to the color palettes of the year 3000. The term is gamut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut) and the point is each current system has its own gamut which is a subset of visible colors.

All of today's print systems, monitors, etc cover a certain subset of visible colors. I think we can expect the technology to improve toward the year 3000, and there will be new colors that we can't represent today in sRGB. But until then, no, sadly we don't have access to (all) those color palettes.

But hey, the colors we have today are forward-compatible.
Does anyone know why the alternative version on that page has an unhappy ending and the original version has a happy ending?

(See the footnote at the bottom of this page: http://home.bresnan.net/~cabreras/theboy.htm)

Who wrote the alternate? Why would the author approve of one but not the other?
star trek's universal translator :)
I'm curious if anyone does it now for reasons entirely unrelated to taxes or inheritance or finance or the hassle of filing taxes/regulatory in general, but purely as a political protest or something like that.

I only know one person (who wasn't otherwise a criminal) who renounced for what seemed like totally non-financial, non-administrative reasons: Vince Cate, back in the 1990s, when he was my neighbor in Anguilla and wanted to work on crypto stuff during the ITAR ban days.
I have been using feedly for the past few months. So far, the experience has been pretty great. It doesn't really slow down for me, even on old computers running winxp. They are pretty quick to iron out any bugs. The UI is fairly simple and similar to Google Reader. These three factors were my test for finding the right alternative. I will be honest and say that feedly was the first one I tried out so I can not give you a comparison to others.

They are currently pulling the feeds from your google reader account, but will be transitioning seamlessly (or so they claim) to their Normandy project when Reader shuts down for good. If you do not want to take a risk with any bugs, issues, or delays that might occur, I suggest looking elsewhere.
Oh come on guys. Every country has some tax blip that makes it foolish for a small number of people to live in that regieme. Fine. Lets not extrapolate that out to headlines designed to be read as "millions are throwing away their citizenship - its all because we are over taxed!"

Plus please realise America is a low-tax country compared to Europe and Australia because it has a minimal welfare state, compared to Europe and Australia.
Great synopsis. However, maybe this is more of a publicity stunt? He probably knows the case isn't going to work out in his favor, but perhaps he thinks the headlines will.