skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When a person writes a reference letter, it is supposed to include both strengths and weakness of the job candidate. This is sensitive information that is necessarily sent directly to the intended recipient.

If you require the letter to go through an unknown / untrusted third party on the Internet, the person writing the letter will necessarily water down their criticisms for fear of the letter being seen by unintended eyes, and for fear of liability.

Going through a third party may increase convenience, but it decreases the actual value of the reference.
>And of course, blaming the AMA and doctors is another great diversion.

Seems like a reasonable cause for problems. Sure, on an individual level they're not evil, but put them in a huge association with the second-highest lobbying expenditure of any group in the country.
"When it was over, it was over"

...is also far from correct. The US political system subsequently basically mirrored the conflict, and it continued until both major political parties underwent profound changes in the 1970s.

In much the same way (but more pronounced) Ireland had a civil war in 1922-23 and the two largest political parties today are the two opposing sides of that war. They really don't differ on any substantive matters of policy but each party loathes the other.

Ring any bells?
Basically, I didn't want to spend money on wireless network chips and figured I could use the speaker+mic I was using for distance measurements for sending small bits of data too. It currently uses TDMA with 1 second time slots subdivided into 8 bits with sound being 1, and silence 0. The stunning 1 byte/s is good enough for me at this point. Embarassingly, they're still wired together to synchronize time. I'm mostly working on processing the sound to reduce interference (especially the motor noise). They can make a pretty reasonable guess at frequency, but it is getting hard to fit in the Teensy's memory. Maybe I'll get the new one.
The difference is that no one claims they've produced strong AI, because, unlike cold fusion, it's too easy to test. :D
You're quite right. I apologize for my vagueness. Excellent clarification :)
Readership of the NY times: 1 million
Readership of Techcrunch: 2 million+
I actually believe a free market would go a long way to helping correct the problems with our health care system -- even without the government providing that care. In a free market, there would be more doctors and therefore more clinics. When the supply goes up, the costs go down. But I do agree that pharmas have way more power than they should.

The problem is that healthcare in the US is not a free market.

Where do you live, if you don't mind me asking?
There's some data in http://wikileaks.org/leak/crs/RL34175.pdf (Congressional Research Service RL34175): "Figure 15. Practicing Physicians per 1,000 Population, 2004". But I don't think this metric alone can explain cost differences.

For example, the average of the countries sampled is 3.0, with western Europe in the 3.3-4.2 range. The United States comes in at 2.4 - but tied with Finland and above New Zealand (2.2), Canada (2.1), and Japan (2.0). Also, figure 14 shows that the Netherlands (3.6 practicing physicians per 1000) pays its specialists even more than the United States does. At the same time (2004) the Netherlands spent about $3000 per capita, while the US spent $6100 (table 1).

The best story is told in table 4 (CRS-28). Of the $3500 per capita difference between the US and OECD median, the largest single delta is labeled "outpatient care" ($1941). Next are "inpatient care" at $575; "health administration and insurance" at $400; "pharmaceuticals" at $345. I find the administration costs shocking: we spend about 8% of our health care budget on administration, while the OECD median is closer to 2%. This seems to come directly from a heterogeneous mix of private and public spending: according to the CRS Luxembourg has similar spending and a similar mix of health care plans.

But this is a very complex subject. The cost differences are likely attributable to a number of causes, from malpractice suits driving extra tests to weak market forces between insurers and providers (and between providers and consumers). The US may also be paying for overcapacity in order to reduce wait times for procedures.

I see two alternatives: either find a way to strengthen the market forces and improve the legal framework so that the market can control its own costs (no existing example); or convert to a single-payer system (eg, NHS in the UK) so that the single payer can control costs.
repeating myself again, but we were arguing a hypothetical specification and the general statement "but using a DB for chat is a really bad idea."

that aside, the authors requirements for the application were pretty obviously to build something kinda fun using couchdb, he satisfied those requirement, and is obviously not "doing it wrong"

but next time you get into a discussion / argument like this, its usually a good idea to look at all points that have contradicted what you have just said, and say why they are wrong, or admit you were wrong.

saying twitter is not cool, some guys 100 lines of code isnt replacing irc tomorrow, or that routers arent using mysql are not arguments.
Oh man, PJRC is so awesome. My first microcontroller ever was a PJRC 8051 development board.
LooseStitch - Free Online Outliner
Exactly right. The themes of the civil war are still being fought out in the courts today.
"The evolutionary reason..."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The evolutionary reason? That's not how it works. If elongated childhoods wasn't worth walking on two legs, it would have gotten selected out. The two issues, and a complex of others, can't be considered in isolation.

Moreover, our "learning" phase isn't just delayed by a month or three months, we have childhoods that are ten years or more delayed. That isn't explained by any conceivable birth issues. The usual explanation is that we've traded instincts for the ability to learn the behaviors in a non-instinctual manner, which is inherently slower, but far more flexible.... but that's hardly "the" reason either.
Ah, I should have known I had seen it somewhere before, thanks (memory like a sieve).
Maker Faire SF Bay Area May 30-31
How's this for a one-sentence conflict-of-interest?

"These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game," said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that "In most countries in the western world, except for the United States, and recently Canada, medical care is available for free." That is only true for non-zero values of "free".

http://wikileaks.org/leak/crs/RL34175.pdf (Congressional Research Service RL34175) figure 1, "Health Care Spending Per Capita, 2004", shows that every country in the report spends some private money on health care. You yourself spent $5 to replace your lost pharmaceuticals in Spain, didn't you?

Table 1 shows that health care in Spain is 71% public money. Figure 21 shows out-of-pocket expenses per capita: Spain averages almost 24%, and the US just over 13% - of course, the spending in the US is 3x Spain, so that's really about $488 in Spain vs $793 in the US.

Oh, and while it's a common error to think that the US Constitution enshrines the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", it does not. That phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, which has no legal standing.
Is the USB stack developed or do you have to write it for your standalone config?
The same professional association exists in Canada and other countries, yet our health care expenditures are under control.

Well, then we could also blame James Madison. The U.S. is one of the few countries to have a Congress, and the Congressional design is very prone to policy capture by factions.
Here's a question for everyone to help exercise the critical thinking muscles:

What makes you think that the civil war was any more about slavery than the Iraq war was about freedom?

... pause ...

I'd argue that any political group waging war is well served by ideological window dressing that they can adopt so that the war can be sold as something other than humanity acting at its worst or the crude law of the jungle being realized.

Meanwhile, the soldiers are systematically trained to stop thinking of the enemy as human beings. Occasionally there are incidents of extreme atrocity (massive rapes, massacres), which are not isolated incidents, they are simply a consequence of the standard training that arise under certain types of emotional duress. The idea of these broken people being heroes is absurd. They are at best pawns and at worst monsters.

So if you are AT ALL skeptical of Bush's propaganda about the Iraq war, why are you not the least bit skeptical of the standard American propaganda about the civil war?

Why do you think the Iraq war was about oil but the civil war was a grand ideological struggle of good vs evildoers?
Perhaps I should have said, "A better evolutionary explanation for helpless babies is..."

Babies began being born prematurely after humans started walking upright. It was after these helpless babies were born that we evolved the ability to care for them. This may have compounded the issue, because perhaps intelligence was required to care for them. Thus the babies were born with even larger heads and on and on.

Babies can't reproduce, but if the organism does not live long enough to reproduce, the babies aren't born at all, so walking upright is more important than being born able to walk and care for themselves. Some hypotheses suggest that walking upright allowed us to cool our heads and resist heat stroke when trees disappeared in Africa. Large brains were actually radiators disipating heat, and containers for backup neurons when some failed due to running down prey and the extreme heat of desert climates. Thus, babies born with larger brains had more heat resistance and backup neurons, thus more likely to reach fertility.

It is my prediction, that in the future, all babies will be born by c-section.
From their page [http://mill.ucsd.edu/index.php?page=Datasets&subpage=Tas...]:

Scoring Predictions

Evaluation Metric: The evaluation metric for the E-commerce Transaction Anomaly Classification (Easy) is lift at 20%. If S is the 20% of examples that you think are most likely to have a positive label, then the lift at 20% is proportional to the number of positive examples in S.
Rationality versus Intelligence
I don't think Christensen claims that big companies can't generate disruptive innovation

In fact, he expresses the hope that his book will make it possible for them to do so. I distinctly remember going "What?!" when I read that. Who, besides a few big companies who would then monopolize the world, would want that? Luckily it's a fantasy.
Thanks for your big number statistics. Many other countries around the world abolished slavery without going to war. That makes our heroes seem like they were a bit foolish, doesn't it?

Let's not get sentimental about it, war is ugly, and the civil war was about "good vs evil" about as much as the Iraq war is.
Why would testing nuke your work?
Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

Obligatory Onion article:

http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbab...

A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA's Institute For Child Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid.
As a Californian I think there is a political way out. Calfiornia has gone down the road that the U.S. is headed down so you can sort of see the results.

Basically what has happened here is that conservatives who believed in small government lost out to liberals who promised the government would solve everything. Those conservatives then becamse "social conservatives" and started focusing on a bunch of hedge issues while promising to spend as much as the liberals (which is basically where the U.S. is now). Now we're out of money and those "social conservatives" are now turning back into "fiscal conservatives" because the public has finally started to realize spending like there's no tomorrow doesn't work.

For the record I think there's one more step here where liberals start to become more fiscally conservative and focus on ideals that don't cost anything to change like gun control. Think Clinton era liberalism. But that's just my opinion.

So really the political answer to the problems the U.S. now has is to get into enough financial trouble to give political cover to those politicians who would propose spending cuts.
It's an outline of things a virtual assistant could do for you from the mundane, looking for interesting articles, to the questionable, posting blog comments, to being an intelligent avatar. Would I want a research assistant to scour the web for me? Sure. Would I want one to do my day job, enterprise web programming? Why not? Would I want it posting comments on HN? What fun would that be?
I find it humorous that it is sponsored by FICO, the credit card industry friend. College students are those most approached by credit cards. They are also the least likely to understand how to use them appropriately.

FICO is really a system designed to train people how to live beyond their means, through the incurrence of debt.

The best way to avoid the shackles of debt is to have a really bad FICO score.
A very interesting point which I don't see mentioned often, is what was our health care system like before the massive government intervention of Medicare and Medicaid? The good old days prior to that, I even remember doctors making house calls. But seriously, given that the government already controls completely 50% of the health industry and has onerous regulations on the rest, wouldn't the idea that perhaps it is the government intervention itself causing the problem an idea that would be given some credence?

There seems to be an oft-repeating and equally destructive pattern of government causing a problem, then trying to solve it by increasing government intervention.
On becoming a household name
Would enjoy seeing a popularity comparison between apps that follow the 5 step process vs apps that are approved immediately - does it affect app growth positively to get stuck at step 4?
They provide a bunch of ready-made apps that make the thing act as a keyboard, mouse and some other devices. I haven't looked at it in detail, but I got the impression that they've taken care of the nitty gritty bits of USB and let you do the fun stuff.
Conventional Western notions of a childhood full of play and exploration are relatively recent (if we're talking evolutionary time-scales here). True, babyhood is obviously not "useful" in the sense of work. But in poorer or, dare I say more "primitive" cultures, children are expected to earn their keep by helping out where they can. They are made to work. In Dickens's books, for example, one doesn't get the sense of innocent childhood. Children there are treated like incomplete and weaker adults. Perhaps the distinction between babyhood and childhood should be made clearer...
"Ironically, the Nobel Prize was awarded for studies of cognitive characteristics that are entirely missing from the most well-known mental assessment device in the behavioral sciences: intelligence tests."

. . . .

"Nevertheless, recent progress in the cognitive science of rational thought suggests that nothing--save for money--would stop us from constructing an 'RQ' test."
Rather than reinvent tabs in the browser what we really need is a better way to think about multiple tasks on our computer. There is no significant difference any more (and the write up sort of hints in that direction).

From the 80s and 90s, we have things like dialog boxes (task flow), multiple document windows, and application switchers. Mac OS X brought us the dock, which marries launcher and switcher in a pretty bad way if you ask me.

The browser has subsumed all of the above into tabs or multiple windows. ("Launcher" is our start page / bookmarks / google "navigational" queries.)

And it adds some more complications: queueing up tangential things to read, view, or listen to, and special versions of the document, for things like printing.

When I open up a bunch of tabs from Hacker News, it is more like a queue of unrelated topics, and it might even survive between sessions. Other times I am doing an exhaustive research of some topic, from links on Google, and I might even want to keep a complete history of how I navigated. But "here's your e-ticket for the movie tonight, now print it" is very different; it's only good for right now and it needs attention immediately.

Maybe we have to start annotating these tabs and windows differently, either the page authors do so in HTML or JS or we the readers somehow indicate our intention as we open them. That way the browser-tab-operating-system-thingy can start grouping them more sensibly.
It could also be summed up as "shit or get off the pot."

The same situation arises in every aspect of human existence - there are people who read muscle magazines all day long but never got the the gym, and people who read 100 real estate books and never buy an investment property.

Ira's point is good, but seems tangential. It assumes you've done something, and it's a plea not to quit just because you aren't the best... yet. I swear I've heard it before, in some maxim like "our taste always exceeds our art," but I can't find a source.
I see a core point missing: evolving Corruption

I think part of the argument here is that concentrating property rights into the hands of the few rather than the many, especially if the few control the government, makes corruption much more likely. International comparisons (mentioned in other comments in this thread) tend to show that countries with lots of private ownership of the means of production and minimal role of central government in operating the economy tend to have less corruption.
I totally just bought one for the autonomous "RC"-car (it won't be RC when i'm done) that I'm gonna build this summer. Its gonna have gps and every sensor I can think of. Thanks god its summer.
How HBO And Gawker Tricked Us Into Reporting An Ad Campaign As News
I think the last president who kept spending under control was Clinton. Did you vote for him Daniel? ;-)

But seriously, I wonder if this is really the right time to keep spending under control. And that's not a rhetorical question. I'm really not sure. At the start of the great depression they did keep spending under control, but that turned out to be an expensive disaster. On the other hand we seem to be sliding straight into 1970s 2.0 with stagflation, big fat government and oil shock 3.0.

One helpful aspect of the current situation may be that US government debt is denominated in USD. So inflation will help to lower the debt burden without leading to default. And it's not just about government debt, which is pretty average in the US, but also about household debt, which is at catastrophic levels.
You're comparing paper circulation to web page views. Don't do that. A more valid comparison is daily web visitors: nytimes.com with 12 million and techcrunch.com with 1.6 million.

Source: Alexa (http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=techcrunch.com+daily+...)
What puzzled me here was that it took so many years for someone to optimize this. I looked at the code and dug around for 'barrel shifters'.

Funnily enough, this page http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=388350 says that in 1986 both the i386 and 68030 came with one, but it was missing from the Pentium 4.
Sounds like the startup that is running the office space could use some lessons from lean startups themselves.

Who signs a 15 year lease at $12,000 without knowing they can afford it? That's exhorbitant and I am sure that they could find less space for less money and build the business slowly.

This business, probably should go out of business. Let a smarter business person startup a better run alternative in the Portland area. There are myriad examples of shared spaces that aren't losing money.
There's also a limit to how much you can learn from reading, or from analysis - some lessons are only learned in doing the work.

Thoreau makes this point in Walden - "To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it."
The lead in is about Daniel Kahneman who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for his study of non-rational thinking in economic decisions. It's amazing that the noncognative aspects of economic decision making have been neglected for nearly 250 years. Those of you who have taken an introductory economics course have noticed the emphasis on "utils" and perfect markets. I guess this is because economics always wanted to be a science, even if dismal.

The article goes on to discuss the non-correlation between IQ and non-rational decision making and the lack of measures for rational/non-rational decisions. Non-rational doesn't mean irrational, rather it encompasses emotions, gut feelings, biases, and such in decision making.

Web developers and marketeers have some feel for this stuff. That's why we use web analytics and tinkering with design to see what gets the best click throughs.
Why is it important to non-americans?
man find expanded into article? nice.
What bothers me about posts like this, and some of the reaction, is that it boils things down to absolutes. While it's true that there are decisions that should be made quickly and on gut instinct, it's also true that there are decisions which require careful thought and planning. Being a good problem solver is about weighing consequences, planning, and taking action accordingly. Sometimes planning takes 5 seconds, sometimes it takes 5 years. It is true that getting real feedback quickly is invaluable. And with software, we can often take the "ready, fire, aim" approach because change is usually cheap and easy.
Quoting Richard Feynman:

"From a very long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now - there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will fade into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade."
sudo find / -size +1G -exec ls -lah '{}' \; | awk '{print $8" : "$5}' | tee files_over_1G.txt ### This I use alot.
Can it convert avchd .mts files?

I'd love it if it did. One big reason to get a Flip over other camcorders is the ease of putting the vids online.
I think that's a great question. Quite honestly, my post should have been "Why the Civil War is Important to Me"

The lessons about democracies under duress, the nature of war, effective management styles for large organizations, and history are applicable anywhere. In fact, I'd like to see somebody pick up Lee's management style and turn it into a business leadership book. There are lots of good analogies here.

So yes, it's applicable, but the article is not slanted at an international audience, unfortunately.
James Burke discusses how wartime surgeons did an end-run around the unscientific medical establishment. Discussion starts at 7:30 in this clip, and continues in part 2 of the next clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsafOyAdayg&feature=PlayL...

If you've never seen "The Day the Universe Changed," you're in for a treat.
"The same professional association exists in Canada and other countries, yet our health care expenditures are under control."

Many times, the costs are not under control, they are hidden. I come from Europe, and in my homecountry the AMA-like lobby is powerful too. The reason why the health care expenditure seems to be under control is that health care is subsidized by the state. You pay for it with the highest sales tax in Europe. No free lunch, right?