skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course this is quantifiable. In the simplest sense, there's no reason you couldn't allow patients to rate doctors/hospitals based on these factors. But in a broader sense, you have to assume that these factors in turn affect the issues highlighted in the comment (infection rates, re-admission rates, etc.). If the listening skills do not in turn lead to better, measurable care, then it's a non-factor. If it does, then it can be measured.

Now, the measurements may not (especially initially) be perfect. But at least you're creating data points that give you SOMETHING to work with.
The NASA rejection is somewhat unsurprising, because at that point in the space program astronauts were drawn from the military. Of Apollo 11's three crew, all three were in the military, and Armstrong and Aldrin both saw combat in Korea. It wasn't until 1993 that the Air Force allowed women to fly fighters on combat missions.

It's actually quite amazing to me how far women have come since the 1960's. They went from essentially zero representation in the business world to occupying substantial positions of power in just a few generations.
"Why Economists Love Price Gouging, And Why It's So Rare": http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/29/163861383/why-econ...

And, Kahneman argues, when basic economic theory conflicts with peoples' perception of fairness, it's in a firm's long-term interest to behave in a way that people think is fair.
No, you're not. It detracts from the quality of the article.
There is more radioactive material to release from a reactor than a bomb - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_oth....

Whilst a bomb will cause an area to become radioactive itself (through neutron bombardment) that is confined to the local area and I think tends to have short half-lives.
It certainly doesn't excuse your profound and distressing ignorance and belligerence. The facts are that you are not a pilot, were not there, have not received an official statement from the parties involved and are merely voicing an opinion based on what little information the mainstream press has been able to glean in the time since the accident.

Air disaster investigations typically take a while. Most reach conclusions that are extremely non obvious, nor intuitive. I recommend, for the sake of my own sanity and the rest of the people you inflict your opinion on, that you read the following books:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Air-Disaster-Vol-Macarthur-Job/dp/18...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/books/dp/1875671196

There is a third volume available as well if you can stick it out, but perhaps you may gain some much needed perspective.
Keeping in mind the section of the video about sports and kids on the train talking to each other, is it possible that she is not wrong, but that you misunderstood what she was trying to say? If there was some misunderstanding of communication, it is at least partially her fault because she made the choices of communications medium and communications distribution, but keeping in mind the overall tenor of her channel, who do you think she is trying to reach and what do you think she is trying to say?
The Secret That Defines Marketing Now
Anecdotally, the difference between Mario Galaxy, and Mario 64 (two of the more similar ones) are much larger than COD2 vs COD3 (or Halo 2 vs Halo 3).
Show HN: 5000 best Internet services and tools
From what I know of the project, CMS has a GitHub enterprise account that they used internally to "iteratively create on github," this Repo is the one that moved over after release.

It's a big step to have government releasing ANYTHING on Github. And yes, it's the next logical step for them to start projects on GitHub. But they're not there yet -- its worth noting that neither Sunlight nor Code for America start their projects out in the open 100% of the time either. It's new ground, and government will, I think, move more towards developing out in the open as we progress. But for now, I'm pretty excited that they embraced technology from this decade.

I should note I'm the former Director of Sunlight Labs, and am an advisor to Code for America.
Google patches critical Android threat as working exploit is unleashed
Not really sure what this is for. One man has a skinny arm on the header row and it bothers me.
It has to do with the amount of radioactive material and half-life.

From wikipedia:

The Fukushima plants have tons of nuclear fuel, thousands of Fuel Assemblies, more than 6,000 fuel rods in Spent fuel pools.
---

Fukushima: 1500-2000 tons of spent fuel rods

Little Boy: 0.07 tons (140 lbs)

Fat Man: .0068 tons (13.6 lbs)

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/03/how-much-f...
For something you consider to be so fundamentally true that's the mother of all cop-outs. Really, really unhelpful.
Funny story, my grandfather was an engineering grad who joined the RCAF during WW2. He survived the war, and soon afterwards - I presume during the Gemini recruitment drive - heard that NASA was looking for people with, basically, his CV - technical/engineering background with piloting skills.

So, he applied, but was rejected. The reason? He was an alien, and NASA could not hire aliens. Seriously.
Thanks for spelling it out for me like that.
I just hope that enough of us are complaining to everyone who will listen that the spy apparatchik is reined in to be constitutionally acceptable to "We the People."
This is the point I think others may be missing. Charging suffering people more for something due to an "act of God" type scenario is where gouging comes into play. When supply and demand don't meet due to natural changes in supply and demand (more companies using Rails with even supply causes prices for Rails devs to go up), no one faults higher prices being charged. When demand goes up or supply goes down due to a natural disaster, you can be sure that people will notice.

Is tripling the price on New Years Eve in NYC gouging? Not really - it's the same as prices going up for flowers around Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. Demand will be high and would likely not be met if prices remained the same.

Small bumps in price will probably be tolerated due to acts of God, but not outright gouging.
Anytime there is an event that leads to a massive reduction in supply or increase in demand for a resource (in this case transportation), whether because it's New Year's eve or because there is a storm, there needs to be some mechanism to allocate the scarce resource. The best known mechanism for doing this is price. That way if you can wait to travel you wait and if you truly can't wait, you pay up and you get to use the resource (in this case transportation).

If you don't raise the price, people who desperately need whatever it is that there is temporarily a shortage of, may not be able to get it at ANY price because people who don't actually need it are using more than they would at the market clearing price. These users who wouldn't pay up do not receive as much benefit from the resource as those who desperately need it and would pay up. This ultimately leads to a reduction in the overall benefit that accrues to society as a whole.

What Uber did here is absolutely the "right" thing. Ultimately the problem is a scarcity of whatever the resource is. If you don't raise the price, you still have to allocate it and you can't just allocate it based on some arbitrary "need". The fundamental reason communism/socialism always fails is because a you can't ever truly judge how much someone else "needs" something. By asking people to pay up or not you make them evaluate the intensity of their own "need" while at the same time creating strong incentives for people to find substitutes, do without and for producers to produce more.
You and the article seem to be saying totally contradictory things. Was the article just outright lying, or is there some nuance I'm missing?
There was a good article by James Oberg in The Space Review about this, recently:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2310/1

The response to the original letter seems very blunt, but the original letter was written on the day of John Glenn's flight - back then, the requirement to be an astronaut was to be a test pilot.
Shooting the messenger (Secunia and VLC)
>I'm not convinced that I would ever want to code on a tablet.

Well when I type on a on a 10 inch tab - two thoughts cross my head A) This is not working B) This could work given a bit more size and refinement.

So I would not discount tablets as dev devices. Perhaps not as a hardcore workstation, but as a starbucks dev station sure - soon.
> This kind of functionality needs to be delivered as a protocol so users can choose service providers who compete on price, features, and privacy instead of being citizens of a particular platform (Facebook, Apple, Google, MSFT, or increasingly Dropbox).

How would this benefit dropbox?
Meltdowns have the potential to release far more radioactive material than an atomic bomb. The radioactive material tends to consist of isotopes with high nuclear decay rates. And the material tends to stick around longer, slowly poisoning the environment, as opposed to a bomb blast which quickly scatters the material into the atmosphere.
Someone's gotta sell the meth, work at McDonald's, mow the lawns (well, not mine... I mow it myself), make the firecrackers, clean the toilets, etc.

It's all about how we allocate this labor, I guess. Paying everyone the same salary leads to underperformance, so we encourage competition. I'm sure there's a better way, but it probably won't be a total reversal, only a modification, of what we have.
The EU "Cookie law" is not limited to cookies. The term used in regulation 6 is "storage", which includes at least localStorage, headers, and remotely hosted solutions (off the top of my head).
Is that anything more than noise?

Assuming you have a reasonable doctor and let yourself be guided by his recommendations, your bump-on-the-head visits are going to be an hour of you waiting in the waiting room, and five minutes of a nurse taking your blood pressure and the doctor asking you a couple of questions. Billing their time at $240 / hour, you've used up $20 of medical resources, plus a few bucks for the gloves and popsicle sticks they use during the exam.

If every man, woman, and child in the US went into the doctor every month for a bump or a cough, the total cost would be significant in absolute terms -- $72 billion -- but insignificant in the grand scheme of things; $72 billion is less than 3% of current US healthcare spending.
Yes, insofar as their desktop operating system is also their laptop operating system.

A prominent theme at WWDC this year was all of the changes they've been doing to improve power management. That garbage collection thread always running in the background is going to interfere with your efforts to save battery. A predictable strategy based on automatic reference counting, on the other hand...
It's not that simple, and this topic comes up after every kind of natural disaster.

The author is completely missing the fact that the flip side of "price-gouging" is making sure that a scarce resource is only utilized by those who need it the most.

If there are only 20 taxis, and there are 20 people desperately stranded who need a taxi, and 200 people who would just "like" a taxi, then if a taxi costs $200, those 20 people will happily pay for one.

But if a taxi costs only $20, then the taxis will mostly be used by the people who don't desperately need them, and the ones that do might die (if it's that desperate).

Likewise with charging $100 per bottle of water or batteries. It doesn't necessarily make you an asshole -- it's the simplest way of making sure a scarce resource is only allocated to those who truly need it.

And more than that, it incentivizes people to provide that resource -- extra taxis ferrying passengers, extra people supplying water or batteries -- even incentiving people with extra water/batteries at home to sell them to others.

Sure, when there are good networks of trust in a society, and the resource in question isn't really scarce, price-gouging can be unfortunate. And ideally, in cases of disaster, the government should be providing essential resources for all.

But the author of this post seems to be completely and utterly unaware of the positive and possibly life-saving effects of scarcity pricing.
> Where are the free market republicans supporting these practices?

Yes, where? You'd think they and the Ron Paul fans would be all over this.
It's also important to consider that Lasik and cosmetic surgeries are elective procedures characterized by elastic demand. Having a trauma surgeon remove a ruptured spleen, or being treated for a heart attack, are situations where demand is completely inelastic.

One might shop around for the best way to spend a spare $10,000 for an eye lift, but who can be expected to shop for an economically satisfying deal while in a life-threatening situation? Reducing regulation would not change this essential qualitative difference.
How to get a startup acquired
Some discussion from last year, fwiw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253538
Python: Common Newbie Mistakes, Part 2
Streetcodr - realtime code battling
You must have missed:

>> Organizing to improve working conditions makes sense, but the U.S. government stepping in to FORCE employers to meet standards that the union sets is a bit out outrageous to me.

I simply disagree that the government should be involved. If it turns out a factory is dangerous then no one will want to work in it and if they do? Well if they do want to work in dangerous conditions, let them.

The point is, most people wont work in awful conditions and its in the employers best interest not to hurt its employees anyways. In the 1920's when all this hoopla started because the workers rebelled and both the workers and employers were literally shooting at one another (this was also when communism was entering the scene).

Relating it back to this article, its a citizens duty to enact (or attempt to enact) change into the government because the government is there for its populous. A company is there for its own bottom line. The company wasn't forced upon you and you shouldn't force yourself upon it, unless it does so. AKA the company store was bad and forced something unreasonable upon you, for that a union is great and should be formed. In either case unions supported by government intervention are something a tad more draconian in my mind, by denaturing a company and making it about its employees rather than about its product. Leading to issues such as car manufacturers.
Photo transcoding is a fast enough operation that for most sites doing it on-demand with a cache of previous results makes the most sense.

Eg. store only the original to start, when 1024p wide version is requested, check filesystem or database blob cache for 1024p version, if it exists, serve it, if not, transcode then serve it, cache it so next time it is requested you'll have it. This way you don't spend cycles transcoding photos at resolutions that are subsequently never requested as various sizes.

And existing APIs like ImageMagick make all the normal image processing features a breeze to implement.

Granted, photo transcoding is still a good idea for a service for people who really don't care about it and just want something that works out of the box, but video transcoding is a much tougher nut to crack (despite ffmpeg/libav and other solutions, there's still a lot of black magic people who haven't gotten their hands dirty with this sort of thing don't realize is an issue until they start transcoding videos and noticing audio sync and other such issues) and thus I'd be way more likely to pay for a service to do it rather than roll my own with video as opposed to photos.
Well, if you own a house or a nice car or have 100,000 euros in your bank account, then yes get a LLC.
I wonder how this relates to kerberos and/or LDAP systems with SPNEGO for http.
Yeah, so is a vasectomy yet when I went in to get a price on a vasectomy from various doctors, none of them could tell me how much one would be despite each doctor's having performed thousands of them.

Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies play these obfuscation games in order to maximize revenues and profitability.

Removing unnecessary actors from the equation like employers and making pricing publicly visible would do wonders to reform the system.

The fact of the matter is that most surgery isn't emergency surgery. Most procedures can be researched and cost compared.

Even for semi-emergencies, illumination of pricing and other vital information would allow better decisions from consumers who at least knew the reputation of hospitals/providers in their area. I don't know how much a banana costs just now, but I know that if I need a really inexpensive one of dubious quality I can go to the super WalMart down the road. If I want a super fresh one that's probably more expensive, I can go to Whole Foods. If I want a "good enough" mid-price one, I can go to Publix.
I totally agree with most of this. I'm actually not really looking to start a company or apply to YC in the near future, so I mostly posted this because I found it interesting how spot on he was 5 years ago and I'm curious what his more recent thoughts are on this. Also, I'd like to know if my own predictions and thoughts are aligned with those of the guy who's gotten it right so many times before.

Trust me, I wasn't planning to request a list of startup ideas from him so that I could pick one of them out of a hat and apply to YC with it. :-)
Since we're not actually litigating this issue I'm content to take the announcement at its word.
Coffee shops look to oust 'laptop hobos'
Winning the War on Poverty Through Education
Motorola's Atom based RAZR was slower than their ARM based one. The x86 architecture isn't doing anything for you on mobile and so far the reason Intel has struggled is because they couldn't compete on power consumption, a more important factor. Since desktops can burn power, they can run a lot more transistors and run them more quickly. I don't see mobile CPU performance catching up to desktops soon.
Well, pedestrians already have separate thoroughfares and are not allowed on roads, right? What's the difference?
Title should be "... former Principal Architect of Internet Operations ...

Edit: title changed, thank you moderator.
Shared cultural values in the US definitely do not include well-fitted clothes, outside of niche markets like fashion or design, in major cities like New York.

Please don't meta-moderate my contributions to this community.
This is exactly the kind of thing I've been curious about, regarding such "flat" companies like Valve and GitHub.

I've never quite believed that things could go so smoothly as they say. I'm not saying this article is necessarily true, but that I wish there were real research into the negatives of these kinds of management structures (or lack-of-management structures).
Thanks!

I don't mind the presence of "beer culture" so much as long as it's in addition to ridiculously high compensation, and not a sleight of hand to distract people and then underpay them relative to norms ("Look! We're a STARTUP! We have video games! And BEER!")

My attitude is: show me the money ... then we can talk culture. ;)
Keeping in mind her "pi = 4" and similar videos, isn't it better for the audience to always be questioning and always be fact-checking than to blindly trust that what she says is correct?
If this topic is at all interesting to you, you should read Steven Brill's dissertation in TIME titled "Better Pill" from a few months ago. Since TIME has a paywall, here is a link to the PDF of the article:

http://livingwithmcl.com/BitterPill.pdf
Ironic that some members turned out to be rats for the feds.
Simple protocol, makes it simpler to write tools, simpler tools are easier to change, upgread and its simpler to add features, faster development, faster improvment. Better live for programmer.

Also sometimes you need something spcific and then you have to option to code it up yourself, or change a open source library quickly and efficently.
Use S/MIME to send an encrypted mail to German Chancellor Merkel
>Javascript has some really, really bad parts. It also has some very good parts. PHP has the former, but not really the latter.

Not so sure.

PHP is equally dynamic (what with closures et al), with very good reflection style features.

It has an ACTUAL hash instead of using objects a dict.

It has better arithmetic, not the FP horror of Javascript.

It has a class system -- which is something people seem to like and desperately try to imitate in Javascript in 200 ways (very few seem to appreciate prototypical inheritance as is).

It now has generators and traits.

Generally, not that shabby.

It's greatest sin is the hodgepodge that it's standard libraries are. But, given their shortcomings and arbitrary APIs, there are quite complete, feature wise.
Counterpoint: At the time, we had insurance. Great insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield. Also, had State Farm for auto. Our medical policy on our auto policy was exhausted solely from the hospital visit and ambulance ride, and the other at-fault party's coverage (also State Farm) barely covered the first few doctor visits for my wife.

I've now had to pay several thousand dollars out of pocket for my wife's physical therapy, MRIs, and prosthetics, and have been told I will need to sue State Farm to recoup my out of pocket expenses.
That's great to hear.

Personally, I prefer to style the plots with the GUI... it's so much easier and faster than re-running some styling script. Of course, some stylings are too cumbersome to do by hand. For example, I adjusted the opacity of every trace with code to make this plot: https://plot.ly/~cparmer2/302/, which was easier than manually selecting every trace in the GUI.

A couple workflow examples:

- last semester, I used plotly to share results with my advisor. It was much easier to send short-links of my simulation graphs than to export images and send them as an attachment. My advisor could update the styling and view the underlying data behind the graph and he only needed to open up his browser.

- Some R&D labs are interested in using plotly to centralize their data streams. They send data to plotly from their lab instruments (through the api) and share the graphs within plotly to all their team members (through a group feature in plotly)

Plotly graphs can be exported to SVG, EPS, PDF, and PNG, so it's pretty easy to include your graphs in a PDF.

Do you use MATLAB in a team environment?
When I was working at Technicolor/Medinavi (after they acquired most of the chumby employees), I wrote basically this exact service (massively parallel with goroutines and with filesystem-based caching, and they were running it on an AWS instance) in about 100 lines of Go code using ImageMagick through CGO (because ImageMagick has a lot more image operation and resample filter options than the built-in go image/draw package).

Sadly, I obviously can't just share the code because I don't own the copyright.
Under certain circumstances, often involving human suffering or vulnerability, demand based pricing becomes price gouging. Uber's actions here look like price gouging. It's all very simple.

Everyone defending Uber here seems to be either deploying the 'where do we draw the line' fallacy, or claiming that there's no such thing as price gouging.

If you want to defend Uber, you need to show me why what they did isn't price gouging. Or you need to show me that price gouging doesn't exist.
> Looks like when Blake Ross left Mozilla so did understanding the user.

And the rise of the hyperbolic commentators, shit!
Though lock-in is not the strategy, it created the same effect. Not sure why, Google routinely gets a pass for these kind of things. The one true open (its a bit debatable as well) software they did was Android and that is pretty much it. They've taken bunch of unpopular decisions in recent history that affected developers/users. Maps pricing change, Google reader, decent Api support for G+, etc.