skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have any of you been to a nurse-practitioner-managed clinic? We have. 90% of the time when you go to the doctor, you just need the sanity check and the antibiotics. For those cases, the clinic totally beats the doctor's office.

This doesn't seem like a minor thing:

* You don't need to have a relationship with a clinic to drop in. Changing or losing insurance doesn't change the clinics you can visit.

* Clinics are much faster than doctors offices.

* Clinics are much more flexible than doctors offices (again: you just drop in).

* Clinics are much, much cheaper than doctor's offices.

It's been said that a big part of our health care problem (after things like geriatric care) is that front-line services are being provided by hospitals to people with acute conditions, without insurance, who haven't had access to preventitive care. This sounds like a concrete step towards fixing that.
> " time and memory required to duplicate the parent's page tables "

Performance penalty is fairly significant ( unless it's done up front, i.e. to setup a pool of processes, like Apache's prefork mpm ). So doing a fork() per each request is actually a really bad idea (as is creating a new thread, but that's a whole other rant I have reserved) -- I'd say it's an anti-pattern (in Java world it's the "one thread per connection" Enterprise(TM)(R) idiocy lot of servlet containers do/users to do disregarding ThreadPools and NIO).

Memory penalty really depends on your language and its VM (and it's assuming no memory leaks). I haven't looked at arc + mzscheme, but it's actually a big issue for me at work with Perl right now at my present work (too much functionality was implement as cronjobs invoking Perl scripts which do system() after system() -- vs. doing it as daemons doing xs calls into C libraries).

I'll grant mzscheme and arc are likely lighter weight than Perl and its JIT, but unless you're doing pure C it's only a matter of degree.
You should re-read the article; it argues that we should attack scarcity directly, by removing doctors from the picture.
I think the question to be asked, is the question of if it is in the self-interest of the American taxpayer to subsidize schools in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, this is hard to answer. On one hand, it is unclear how more schools in these countries serve our national interest. On the other hand, without education, young people are more privy to fall into the brainwashing of terrorists. So one could make the argument that if one spends on education, that enhances national security by having more educated people in these unstable countries and therefore fewer people who are possible recruits for terrorists. I guess it is all in the way one does it, if one builds schools with good oversight (i.e. overseen by the coalition and Iraqi/Afghan governments) then one could perhaps justify that. However, if there is no oversight, then who knows what kind of stuff might end up getting taught there. We obviously don't want to spend our tax dollars building schools only so that religious extremists can teach in them. The same is true incidentally in the United States. Government vouchers for private schools are wrong, because these private schools often teach nonsense like Intelligent Design, which to my mind is the Ultimate-747-In-The-Junkyard-As-Designer theory and merits no serious consideration, let alone our tax dollars. So if there is a self-interest in our national security in helping with education in Iraq and Afghanistan that may be justifiable, provided there is strict oversight, and if there is no oversight then it is a no go. Similar to how education here at home should not have tax dollars going to private religious agendas. Ideally of course I think states, and not the federal government, should handle education, since this is an issue of federalism, but that is another issue than the present discussion.
I don't believe it's spammy, and if my comment felt that way please excuse the snark. It wasn't intentional.

I believe it's less about how you get the post right and more about who you're asking. As I mentioned above, you need to talk to the people that are already using something similar to what you're... going to build?

Since you're not getting much feedback here, let me be the bird of encouragement that is sitting on your shoulder right now. Find people who you think would have a need for this, and talk to them. Those people apparently are not on HN. Ask the app review sites how they keep up and where they get their feeds from. It's a start!
All the Virgin planes use Linux for the in-flight entertainment system. I think they use Airbus planes too but I'm not sure.
The issues are related, though. Non-doctors are banned from performing certain medical services, and the supply of doctors is restricted.
It seems like it fills holes that Google has rather than acts as a complete superset of Google functionality. I use Google for a lot of the queries they demonstrate, but I have to click-through and dig further to find my answer. With Wolfram|Alpha, there is no need to dig. Yet, it doesn't return "regular" ranked results, which don't require computation -- hence, it's not a superset, and not a killer.

I can see Google responding with a similar offering, especially with their impending Squares release. It'll be interesting competition flaring up in this space.
I'd like to recommend that you consider doing something I did last year. I ran for office. Something that I think less than 1 in 1000 Americans do at any time during their entire life.

It was a small office, and at the state level. I collected (all by myself) the signatures needed to get on the ballot. The entire campaign came out of my pocket (I spent less than $200 and took no contributions from anyone).

My campaign slogan turned into no, you can't have a pony because of all the demands that everyone made.

That generic response is because very few politicians have the time to even read the addresses on every letter they get. And the way our country has reponded is (and the response is in my opinion the absolutely wrong one) to create the lobbying industry. By throwing money at the politicians, they're getting the access that you should have gotten as a constituent.

I learned one heck of a lot of stuff. About me. About the press. About politics. About all the ways one can screw stuff up. About how little that the majority of people care about things. It wasn't at all like Mr Smith Goes To Washington.
Did you read the article? He doesn't think this would be "cool"! He's saying that this could be used to identify people who thought they were anonymous. The main point he makes is that people consider the fact identification is difficult if someone has only one location, but overlook that it's much easier if someone has two locations.
This point seems misguided. Your right to medical care doesn't force nurses and doctors to become nurses and doctors - on the contrary it enables their right to a job if that is their chosen career path.
It probably matters less, but it matters for risk of birth defects: http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jul/23/health/he-25555 and http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/20030... and others you can google for.
A Pakistani Underworld
A recommendation: consider state legislators as well. Perhaps in your next revision?

I only saw the 2 senators and 1 representative in DC. I didn't see any of my congresscritters in Denver (I live in Colorado).
Agreed. On top of that, Apple really isn't spending that much to create this platform. Once it's made, it requires a bit of overhead but basically the revenue from this should cover it.
I'm afraid there's nothing NLP about WA, neither Google

You might be mistaken there, Google very much uses NLP , though at the backend and not at the user interface.

Norvig himself said so ... I cant find to the exact talk where he said this( It was one moderated by Nova Spivak,if I can remember correctly) but here's a link to a TC article that discusses this ..http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/18/googles-norvig-is-down-...
Strategic Protectors
The X Window innovation: welcome to the new Xorg
> On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good.

Maybe its me, but I've found a lot more comments within the past fortnight or so grating on me than previously. Remarkably, every time I checked the submitter, they'd been on Hacker News for about a year and a half at least.
And by grating I basically mean rude and unhelpful.
Thanks, that sounds the most promising.
there is also pligg and reddit
But we need to move away from the "guild" mentality that has kept boundaries narrow and created regulatory, licensing and reimbursement obstacles to new models of health care delivery.

Fair enough, and some of his ideas seem good, but the "guild mentality" is precisely what's keeping the supply of doctors down. There are regulatory burdens on both sides of the equation, and I don't think it's entirely clear which way things would move if they were relaxed.
If you're not a Lisp hacker you really don't want to run your own news.arc.

http://www.slinkset.com is the easiest option, they have a theme that looks like HN.
P2P study confirms music crackdown is bad for business
It's not as if it's hard to actually figure out the cost of living difference between Ottawa and San Francisco. They're ranked all over the place. Ottawa and Chicago are neighbors in the rankings on the first page of the Google results. $80,000 in Ottawa therefore approximates $108,000 in San Francisco.
Also, look at Venti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti) from plan9.
Or Google buys Wolfram Research? I hope not, but how much would it be if it happened?
Here is how posts like these sound to me:

"I know lots of smart people. We are awesome. We talk all the time and have awesome, awesome conversations. You're not a part of them. We nail it. We're important, thoughtful, disruptive, and fantastic."

I'm not saying this is intentional. And for the record, I agree with many of his conclusions, but the buzzwords are so distracting.

Dilbert made Buzzword Bingo famous: http://dilbert.com/fast/1994-02-22/

It would not be difficult to update this for VCs or even Web 2.0 in general.
Isn't the real solution to avoid "me too" solutions in crowded spaces? If you can't segment or develop a unique appeal to a niche when you are starting out it's not clear how much value you will be able to create as a startup. An established company may launch a "me too" as a part of a brand extension or to have a complete line of products, but I can't think of a good reason for a startup to do so.
Or, perhaps you could define 'merit' as continously compounding interest with their average karma density (votes/items).

Taking the interest forumula "Pe^(tr)", and substituting might yield something like:

P = 1, -1, it is the single up/down vote

t = user life span in years

r = karma/submissions (karma_density)

for (user:item.voters) item.merit += (sign_of_vote)e^((user.life_span/12)(user.karma/user.submissions))
Accept that for any value of political power y, there will be some corruption x.

Solve for the minimum of x. Don't get fooled by local minimums.
Twitter search with auto-refresh?
Ah, okay. But I was getting at the doctors' reaction to this proposal. Judging by a few of the comments on the article, doctors don't agree with that proposal. But is it because they're concerned for their patients' well-being, or because they're concerned about the possible loss of income? Both are plausible reasons, but they each invite different counter-arguments. How are we supposed to know why the doctors oppose this, and how credibly should we take their argument?
What about y = 0?
the MBAs who don't know any better (aka C people with money/power)
I went down to Cape Canaveral to watch the Atlantis launch on Monday.

It was the greatest thing I have ever seen.

I have never felt that much emotion about an event in my whole life.

Only 7 launches are left before they retire the shuttle and I highly recommend you make the trip.
The 10MM bplan retains the option of becoming a 200MM bplan, because they didn't shackle themselves to a VC-led investment board. You can always take funding later, if you need it.

The opposite isn't true.
It might also be useful to indicate whether you are interested in local candidates only, plan to provide relocation compensation, or can deal with remote employees.
Well, personally I believe the higher prices are well worth the cost. Someone I know sums it up best: "Macs cost more only if you value your time at zero".

But I agree with your call for specifics. For eg 4 GB DD3 Ram for Macs at Apple is $200 [1] vs at Amazon (random pick) is $78 [2]

[1] http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_13_2_4_MB

[2] http://www.amazon.com/CORSAIR-PC3-10666-1333MHz-240-pin-Chan...
This just in: actually developing as a student makes you look better than Just Going to Class. Article doesn't really have anything to add beyond what you get by Googling computer science student advice (to use the first query I dreamt up).
No one would use non-open software, and no one would send their personal information.

In that case, both my blathering and Stallman's would be irrelevant, on this subject.

I think that universal suffrage is not in the same category as privacy, because nothing about technological advance really dictated it. Privacy and copyright are more like slavery (not making a moral statement here!), in that after certain technological advances, it's just not possible to sustain them and continue competing economically. That's what I mean when I say that privacy is dead: without some unforeseen technological problem (or solution, if you're so inclined) that makes it possible to control other people's computers with your software against their will, it's only a matter of time until societal mores catch up and recognize the de facto situation.
Summary: your home and work locations represent a simple "hashing function" that will allow firms to uniquely identify us. This information on the surface wouldn’t seem to represent a privacy risk but is and it's becoming easier for third parties to collect with the proliferation of location based services.
You say that if you sell a 10MM company, chances are you'll be handcuffed to the acquirer. This seems like pure supposition on your part. I know plenty of people who wound up handcuffed to their VC-backed team, due to vesting, incentive packages issues after shatteringly bad valuations, or just terms and conditions of the deal.

The same forces seem to be at play in the 200MM case as in the 10MM case, with the significant difference that in the 200MM case, the interests of the board aren't aligned with the interests of the founders.

This is all a big moot point, of course, because you aren't going to build a 200MM company.
Contenture - an anti-ad network?
I would refer pg to the work of the pragmatic school. Pierce James, and Dewey offer a totally different view of philosophy.
> Isn't the real solution to avoid "me too" solutions in crowded spaces?

The "me too" start up usually do provide some added value or a differentiating feature. However, since the big-name, established services are, well, so well known, they tend to identify the service "category". In this situation it's hard to differentiate your startup too much, as that would mean exclusion from the category.
I've noticed a lot of the top voted comments lately are riddled with poor thinking and logical fallacies. I'm not sure if the smartest commenters are leaving, but the crowd definitely seems to be rewarding nonsense.
I think the traditional answer is pirates :O
My other post in this thread was a little harsh on Fred, and I'll agree that he and others are in a bubble, but brainstorming without regard to implementation is not necessarily pointless. In some cases, it's the step that comes right before thinking about implementation. Maybe only a tiny percentage of ideas reach that implementation step, but that doesn't mean the whole process was pointless. Isn't brainstorming about throwing everything at the wall, and then seeing what sticks?
People want to support the sites they depend on. Contenture makes this possible. Contenture users pay into the system, their money is distributed to the Contenture-enabled sites that they visit.

Anyone who thought ad revenues were low as they are should wait to see how really low tip revenues can get.

Disclaimer: I run an ad network :-)
Yeah. I had been thinking of that. There should probably be a third term Z that has some sort of inverse proportionality relationship to y that represents cartels/warlords/etc that fill the power vacuum of a very low y situation. This would also cause x to be very high. (eg: Somalia)
Linux does have something like Bifrost - and better stuff. OLPC uses linux.

Newer versions of windows also have a very advanced security model.

OSX is the weakest current OS, and one of the easiest to exploit. There's a number of ways you can crash and exploit it... it's just too easy.

It's funny that Ivan was blasting apple for having a very weak OS. http://radian.org/notebook/nils2own Not his own work, but someone he has associated with found the various exploits.

Considering how much damage he did to OLPC by writing bad things about it, apple would do well to hire him... just to stop the bad publicity. I can't wait to he quits... it'll be very entertaining.
I'm having a hard time believing that a benchmark that produces a 300% speedup just from eliminating CALL and RET could be realistic. The cost of accessing cached memory on the program stack is close to the cost of accessing a register.
I actually have a twitter account that I set up when I had some potential work involving the twitter API. I refuse to actually use it though. I see twitter as contributing to degeneration in the quality of human communication. It mandates the very sort of short, low-quality messages that are discouraged here on news.yc.
Stephen has said many times that he will not be bought out.

The important thing to understand is that Stephen Wolfram built Alpha as his personal "publication platform." He is going to use it to in effect "publish" his ideas about NKS and computation in general into immediately useful form, to the entire world. Rather than write papers.
Basically, Jobs hates the house because he moved there right before he was kicked out of Apple and stayed there in what is posssibly the "darkest" time of his life (pre-NeXT and Pixar, and Apple part 2)

EDIT: I'm not "speculating" -- this is direct from the book: "The Pixar Touch", unfortunately, there's no source online.
Technically, the other PC isn't even needed, as you can get a TCP/IP stack for the PCjr: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ (and at one point, you could even telnet to this guy's PCjr, although that was for testing purposes).
I don't think I would distinguish between z and y. In other words, a high z is the same as a high y, and of course either one causes a high x.
I think the author of the article considers segmentation and "unique appeal" as me-too solutions, albeit good examples of them.

So you two are saying the same thing.
I, and my data, disagree. Most memcmp() calls look at a single byte and return.

Let us consider five test cases:

memcmp0 - Calling memcmp() at each byte in the file looking ofr a match, as the original article.

memcmp1 - As above, but optimize by checking the first character and only calling if it matches.

memmem0 - A single call to the glibc memmem() function. Not portable.

kmp0 - The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm as implemented at "Exact String Matching Algorithms", http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/index.html

bm0 - The Boyer Moore algorithm, also from above

Looking for a 1k needle which lies at the end of a 100MB haystack of random bytes, with the data in file system buffers on a 1.6GHz Atom processor running Linux 2.6.29:

algorithm milliseconds
memcmp0 2400 ==================================
memcmp1 530 ========
memmem0 460 =======
kmp0 970 ==============
bm0 70 =

On the whole codesink1 wins with the Boyer Moore suggestion. In broader terms, algorithm selection beats optimization and all is right with the CS universe. (KMP's poor showing surprises me, but I've not used it before and don't know what to expect.)

If we assume the data is out on a hard drive, then we get these numbers (same machine, a WD Green Power HD which is an evil thing to benchmark with because it has variable spindle and seek speeds, but suffice it to say it is not terribly fast). All OS caches flushed before each test.

algorithm milliseconds
memcmp0 3500 ===================================
memcmp1 1300 =============
memmem0 1200 ============
kmp0 1700 =================
bm0 1100 ===========

Here disk read time sets a lower bound, algorithm is still important, but not so much as before. I have a sneaky suspicion that mmap() is a poor choice here. There doesn't seem to be much overlap between the IO and compute when looking at the memcmp0 times.

Testing on a beefier machine, with a Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz, OS X gives this:

algorithm milliseconds
memcmp0 1100 =========================
memcmp1 180 ====
memmem0 not portable
kmp0 360 ========
bm0 88 ==

The processor is several times faster, but bringing pages in from the OS is slightly slower. I don't know how to flush OS buffers on this machine so I can't do the disk reading tests.

Update: well crap. this fell of the front page before I finished testing. No one will see these results, but I enjoyed the tests anyway. It is useful to update my rules of thumb and preconceived notions.
Open Database Alliance
See linking blog entry: http://blogs.gnome.org/mneptok/2009/05/13/the-light-at-the-e...
I'd argue that a fortress in Edgewater has less to worry about than a thatched hut in Kenilworth, especially if the socioeconomic situations of the areas in question is about to be reversed.

Keep in mind, if Mac OS X ever does become the dominant player, it will be targeted by the same people currently targeting windows, I'm totally unbiased on this issue, I use linux almost exclusively, neither of these eventualities has any effect on me, it's simply a statement of fact.

If OS X ever does win it's going to have to deal with the exact same set of enemies as windows currently does.

But when that happens surely we'll be better off right because the OS X codebase is more inherently secure than windows? right? right?

Pwn2own, how did that go down again.

Hmm.
Broken Browsers Part One: The Back Button
So you would recommend that someone move to a fortified house in a high-crime neighborhood, as opposed to a nice house in a rich suburb, so that they'd be less exposed to crime.

Then you back that argument up by repeating my argument.

Glad we're on the same page.
A whole week? Interesting. I didn't know the lag time was that long - I thought the newsstand date was just so the magazine wouldn't look out-of-date until the day the next issue hit. For what it's worth, I posted the original submission after reading the article on my Kindle.
I was tempted to agree there -- but that's the thing, whatever comes along and replaces Google won't look like Google, and we probably won't even notice it happening.

I don't think Wolfram Alpha is that. I think its goal is honestly too ... computational, logical, factual ... to have the broad appeal of Google. But I don't think that because something is fundamentally different than Google means that it's not the fabled Google killer.
Yeah, I know you discuss that the tradeoff is "worth it", but if you're writing CSS classes like that you lose a lot of the ability to redesign your site in the future without restructuring markup. The whole point of using CSS in the first place is to separate style from markup. The classes might still be "descriptive", but you're definitely putting style right there in your markup.

If you're set on using a CSS framework, I really think Compass (http://compass-style.org/) is a must. However, the syntax is so wacko I can see anyone's aversion to it.

A definitive solution to this problem has yet to emerge.
The eyes have it - a tale of 3 vision problems