skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "benefit of the public"...can be stretched infinitely, to the ending of the rule of law

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government can take property from one private party and give it to another private party for "economic development" [1]. So it's already been stretched pretty far.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Hard for me to follow his argument when he dismisses Xbox in a footnote for the exact reason he lauds others (relevance, not profits).
The website grabs a single certificate from the persona server the first time it sees a particular e-mail hosting domain; all this reveals is that someone in that domain (no specifics as to who) tried to log in at the beginning of the lifetime of that certificate in the cache. Until the cache expires, an arbitrary number of users can log in to the site without any communication touching the persona server. It doesn't reveal who logged in, when in the cache lifetime they logged in, or even how many people logged in.
Ethnic homogeneity is also an issue. If you think that an arab living in france gets the same quality of healthcare as a european french person at the same poverty level, you're kidding yourself. Not that the US doesn't have these problems. Ultimately, different ethnicities get different diseases, too, so the bureaucrats in charge of deciding what gets covered and to what extent are basically institutionalizing racial privilege.

However, naive grass-is-greenerism is more of what I was railing against.
Some of this data is supposedly being used to target street level crime by the DEA though - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.
Is today's honey safe to eat?

Comments have mentioned "pesticides" and "herbicides". Wouldn't those become concentrated in honey? I assume that bigger objects such as "mites" can be filtered out of the final product, but the chemicals would remain.

Also someone posted a link to Chinese honey being "laundered". It's apparently being dumped at artificially low prices. While that's bad for business, it's not necessarily bad for my health. But is there something in the Chinese honey that's potentially harmful to us? The linked article didn't say.
It's always in the seller's interest to create a complex and opaque system of pricing, especially when the buyer doesn't even pay for the services. This is why free markets aren't the answer to everything. It's free and open markets that drive efficiency out of any process.

The problem here is one of incentives. If I promise to pay you for mowing your neighbor's lawn, and he rarely reviews what you're doing and I rarely check with him, suddenly mowing the lawn gets really complicated and expensive. If, on the other hand, you walk next door and solicit the neighbor to mow his lawn, suddenly it's a very simple transaction. The difference is one of incentives. If the goal is to provide mowed lawns, the neighbor is the guy responsible. If the goal is to provide a rationale for writing a check? Heck, I got all kinds of easy rationales handy. I can play this game all day.

It should be illegal for anybody to pay a medical bill except for the person receiving treatment. If you want universal coverage, that's fine: pay the patient and have the patient pay the hospital and doctor. Once you begin to incentivize other players besides the patient, you're going to create a mess. I'd also recommend completely unbundling hospital services. Patients should be able to buy materials and services on the open market -- and keep the savings they make doing so. Hospitals should provide clean, sterile rooms for independent specialists to work, not form a pricing cabal controlling anything that happens inside the walls and incentivized to game the system.
Lists of freely available programming books in all languages
Ok. See it now. I was confused seeing that as the title -- but don't need to weigh in on the whole HN perennial titling debate.
Argos - The UK's Analogue Amazon.com
When they say "queries" -- are they referring to those initiated by Humans? Or algorithmically by systems?

I'd bet that there are infinitely more informational transactions that happen algorithmically than what they refer to, and thus all these numbers are pointless.

Basically the NSA needs to end.
the best solution is obviously some kind of public-private partnership, so that we can get the best parts of the public sector with the best parts of the private sector. There's no way we'll wind up with the worst parts of both.
> The second thing to note is that most people agree that one feature of a civilized society should be some form of wealth redistribution, so that as many people as possible can live happy lives ...

What? Where are these "most people"? History flatly contradicts this thesis. Were you napping when all the Communism experiments went belly-up? Were you asleep when the more aggressive socialist experiments scaled back when they realized their ideals had collided with reality?

Wealth redistribution does not produce more happy people. By eliminating any incentive to work, it assures that, instead of some poverty, there is universal poverty.

"Why Socialism Failed": http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/why-socialism-failed#a...

"Criticisms of socialism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_socialism
In other words, we should trust the DHHS and the IRS with information that the NSA can't be trusted to access? Am I reading that correctly?
This looks really cool. Could you go into some details on the stack used?

Also what does your API look like right now?
How could the Hyperloop actually work?
I thought that one of the comments - to the effect that this article tells us relatively little about Borges and perhaps more about the author - was very perceptive. I am going to try to remember not to fall into that trap.
Announcing FooPros - Connect with Clients - Find WordPress Professionals
> Copy the health care system of any other rich country.

This is easier said than done. The link between socialism, still a profane political philosophy, and municipal health care is too strong—the time it would take to switch it over is be on the order of election cycles, not years. Granted, we are already on that road, but it's going to be a long time before any mainstream politician embraces it.
How do people here value the opportunity costs of living in a major tech center?

With the lower cost of living of not living in a tech center, you also give up other non-monetary things.

I would think that a lot of innovation comes from being surrounded by like minded people and the access to tech talks and networking events.
I filched this from an old mainstay of the web, the Arts and Letters Daily ( http://www.aldaily.com/ ), and submitted it with the ALD blurb that caught my attention: "Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages". It comes up midway through the piece:

Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages. “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one,” he wrote in 1941, “the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”

This is not complimentary, a backhand comes up next. The writer is critical of Borges, mostly on rather shaky grounds at the end, but he does offer a few worthwhile contributions.
I'm going to guess you need to backslash-escape your stars.

EDIT: Nope, that wasn't it.

shakes fist at crazy home-grown not-quite-Markdown
or maybe it just wasn't as bad as previous incidents :)
No. Code golfers love bending rules. See http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B
Startup update: Better and More Focused
Fun fact: I did an internship at IBM on OS/2 device drivers ('95, so Warp was out, Win 95 wasn't yet) in Boca Raton in offices that Microsoft had vacated just a few years earlier. Incidentally, That part of Boca was shutdown while I was there and moved to Austin; also I now work for Microsoft.

Warp was really a nice system for its time. Switching to Win95 later was a huge step back for me.
How is making internal changes to an unpublished API evil?
> This is why free markets aren't the answer to everything.

Perhaps I've misunderstood you here but in my opinion the way healthcare works is sort of the opposite of a free market and if a free marketplace for health services were allowed to exist then things like $500 bags of saline solution wouldn't exist.
Emphasizing "shareholder value" as a corporate strategy has always seemed self-evidently short-sighted and foolish to me. I find that it is frequently embraced by the sort of people who look for quick answers to complicated problems; who prefer their answers simple and free of nuance. The same bunch who hold a near-religious faith in the ability of Free Markets to solve all of man's problems in the most efficient way possible. If only things were so simple. You'd think that 2008 would have been enough to put neoliberalism behind, but sadly it is not so.
One of the big reasons for this problem is Medicare. The reimbursement that Medicare offers is often far less than it costs the hospital. Why does Medicare not cover the cost of a procedure? Usually because it did cover it in the past (to the point of generosity) and providers reacted by shifting their services to maximize the profits.

A good example is the infusion of drugs. Medicare pays ASP+4% (just cut from +6% due to sequestration). If you're a clinic that doesn't get a discount on their drugs (mostly community based clinics) you're often paying more for the drug than the gov't pays you (it's a net loss every time you prescribe the drug).

However, the gov't does pay a lot to infuse the drug. The result? Providers everywhere were starting their own infusion clinics and making a ton of money on it. The profit from infusion clinics would be used to offset the loss from the purchase of the drug. CMS clamped down on reimbursement for infusion services recently, but it's still a profit center.

This happens all the time in the US healthcare system.

So what do hospitals do? They jack up the price on every item they possibly can. Of course insurance companies know what is up, so they negotiate much better rates for all of the items. However, for those who are uninsured, they pay the charge master rate which is very inflated.

The problem with the US healthcare system is not that's a free market, because it isn't. The problem is that's not a free market and it's not a fully regulated market, it's something in between. So what happens is that some regulations are put in place, some of which cause certain procedures to be unprofitable, so providers simply shift those costs to the un-(or less) regulated prices.
I guess you could stretch and say he means "myth" like you might use "lore" or "mythology" as in the collected beliefs of a group or people, but that's stretching it, if you ask me.

I'm not a DBA, but I really like reading articles about common pitfalls and mistakes, to broaden my knowledge base. Something like "'SELECT *' and your ORM might be using it for you" would have been a much more informative title to me, without dancing around the clearly intended use of the word "myth," and I personally would have still read it, without expecting content completely at odds with what I would say is the natural interpretation of the title.
This is a special case, it is a privileged application that is getting more permissions then normal ones. Therefore they don't want you to load code from the internet and run it on peoples phones.
NCDU the HTOP for disk usage
Maybe it's the English influence? He was an avowed admirer of English literature and spoke fluent English, which he got from his half-English father.
Yeah - I'd like to see anyone name any improvements to iOS that have been made over the past 3 years. It hasn't changed at all.
Same here. I especially like being surrounded by books. This is probably why I have WAY too many books in my apartment (it looks like the apartment of the book guy in that movie Unfaithful but more cluttered) and why I often go sit at the Barnes & Noble cafe to work, as opposed to going to, say, Starbucks or Panera Bread.

I'm a fan of e-books and definitely think they have their place (I've purchased a total of 3 Nook devices over the years), but I am not ready to wholesale walk away from dead-tree books either.
This is it in a nutshell.

The US system didn't become this way because the people involved thought it was a great idea, it became that way because of perverse incentives through which services are paid for.

All you need to do is look at how providers act and you can tell what they make money on and what they don't.

Why do you think nearly all hospitals have emergency departments? It's not because they are providing a service to the population, it's because it's a great source of profit. Same thing with cardiac centers.
Turns out, it is.

Even if one is willing to accept them into one's general worldview... First principles - like "government is wasteful" - only go so far in the face of conflicting data. And there is a lot of it on the topic of healthcare systems.
Can anyone explain why he believes a future lunar colony would be located at the Moon's north pole?
Wow thats quite coincidence, but before I get in to that, I like the the tone on HN much much better today. There were several language related posts, all were reasonably well received. None with the frequent hostility that I have come to see on HN in the recent past. No one, came here to piss and rain smugly on another's voluntary piece of work with "Repeat after me, no one gives a flying f%$#! about your language, where are the libraries, where are the users. Dont waste your time in pointless excercises".

That said, the coincidence that I mentioned is entirely personal. After a hiatus, I am getting my toes wet again in this language that I find quite interesting. Its a whole program analyzed, aggressively inlined, functional, but not purely so, ML like type-checked and type-inferred language with generics that interacts quite effortlessly with C++, without the need for any ffi like library. It has coroutines and preemptive threads.

I think of it as something that does the same to C++ what Scala does to Java or F# does to C#. It is really performant and achieves the speed via aggressive inlining, tail calls, whole program analysis and what can be called opportunistic but indeterminate laziness. I have not quite grokked its model yet, one thing that I want to get a handle on is to be able to reason what triggers garbage collection and what doesn't. According to the author of the language, garbage collection can be mostly avoided, but I am not yet good at this aspect, but its just been a few days that I have actually used the language (as opposed to reading about it).

Its statically typechecked but feels unusually flexible in one aspect: one can move functions and types around the between and across different translation units freely (for refactoring) without the need for forward declarations because the linkage semantics are permutation independent.

The language that I am talking about is Felix http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/nutut/intro/intro_index..... It has been discussed on HN a few times and I have mentioned it a few times myself just because I find it really interesting, not because I have a dog in the fight. The language author does frequent HN but very very rarely.
...

Okay, what's this about Larry Page's sex life?
At one time, IBM controlled around 70% of the whole IT business, probably more. Mainframes, minis, comms, switchboards, typewriters. IBM even ran its own bank (IBM Credit Corp).

Microsoft happened to steal a very small part of IBM's monopoly, which got bigger over time, but IBM's revenues are still bigger than Microsoft's even 32 years later. (And IBM has been spinning off or selling whole businesses along the way, eg the PC business to Lenovo; spinning off Lexmark).

I was talking to one US corporate IT manager who said IBM was still a third of his budget cf 3% for Microsoft.

Big picture: Microsoft's monopoly has always been much smaller and less powerful than the IBM monopoly used to be. However, in time, all tech monopolies tend to get largely undone by new technologies.
No, that's still not right, because it wasn't for using jQuery. It was for using versions of jQuery that did unsafe things. You can use versions of builds of jQuery that does eval JavaScript and not get rejected.
Not arguing with Google's strategy, but has anyone ever really thought about the "more wood, fewer arrows" analogy?

If you look at the battles that were won by archery (Crecy, Agincourt, Mongol domination of Chinese, Moslem & European armies) it was the volume of arrows that won them, not the weight of the arrows.

There were some battles where arrow weight was mildly important (eg, at Agincourt where the French armour had advanced enough since Crecy that it gave some reasonable protection against arrows). But even in these battles the archers used heavier heads on the arrows (which were also shaped differently) - not more wood.

Anyway - totally off topic, and like I said I think Google's strategy is good. But their analogy breaks down when we actually look at history.
Netscape also put itself out of business by arrogance and making dumb decisions, plus some very poor programming.
nice!

I did a webcrawler with node.js myself last year. It's only a quick try but you can find the worker class here: https://gist.github.com/zerni/6337067

Unfortunately jsdom had a memory leak so the crawler died after a while...
I don't think the libtards in the USA (our equivalent of left-wing prats in the UK) have been very active. If this stuff had become known during Bush's presidency, we would have:

1) incessant calls for impeachment
2) Nightline counting day xxx of the "constitutional crisis"
3) manufactured outrage on the evening news
4) daily apoplexy on the topic from all the talking heads

But we have very little of that from the mainstream media. Obama is their guy, so he pretty much gets a free pass. Nancy Pelosi doesn't have any problem with any of this.

There's at least some hope for the USA. HN has linked to innumerable articles about this, and most posters here do see the problem.
So this is by design isn't it? The fact that insurance covers everything and the hospitals do not have to eat up any costs begs for this to happen. If the majority of customers (patients) pay out of their pocket then the hospitals would be incetivized to make themselves attractive to patients. Else why the hell do they care? In fact they mark up prices multiple times to offset any unforeseen costs of eating up costs as well. There is no incentive in price transparency, no incentive to compete among hospitals. Honestly if you are covered then as an individual you don't care either. I am not sure what the solution is here.
Still, he did manage to find a human being to talk to (so it's better than Google, which appears not to employee carbon-based lifeforms) and the human beings had the ability to deal with the issue (so it's better than Apple, which does employ lifeforms but doesn't authorise them to make any decisions).
For an interesting systems programming language try ATS [1]. It's an ML style functional programming language with dependent types, linear types, macros, generics and compiles to C giving reasonable portability.

[1] http://www.ats-lang.org/
oh. ok, so that's worrying / embarrassing. since i am no expert perhaps i have misunderstood things. i'm just leafing through ficciones now and i guess there may be words i think are invented that are simply obscure. or maybe he uses non-latin words that, for me, seem easy but are unusual in spanish?

how is someone like donoso rated? that's the kind of thing i find impenetrable...

[edit i just googled to see what others think, and i guess you don't get articles like this http://theclubofcompulsivereaders.blogspot.com/2011/07/es-ta... if he's as easy as i thought]
NASA to test laser communications link with new lunar mission
I see a lot of developers using earphones and listening to music while doing their stuff. As someone that prefers relative quiet I have always wondered if this makes them more, or less productive.

This article would tend to indicate the latter but of course there is a big difference (generally) between music and noise.
I think there are 2 big factors that always seem to be missing from these investigations. The high costs offsets individuals who don't pay for their healthcare. Keep in mind that the hospital must treat anybody who walks in the door and they frequently do not get reimbursed by the government. Also keep in mind that the solution must be perfect when it physically cannot be. Because if there is a .0001 percent chance of failure, every doctor that treated the patient gets sued, the hospital gets sued for several million, the manufacturers gets sued, the middle man gets sued, heck the receptionists probably gets sued too. Think of the costs of insurance for every party involved. Obstetricians often pay $85,000 to as much as $200,000 for malpractice insurance. That's just the doctor.

Reduce the malpractice payouts and shield doctors like other countries do. Make the government absorb more of the costs for care. The price could probably be cut by 200 to 300 bucks.
It still happens in the iOS world. I bought RAD Soldiers and it hounds me via notification to play it every few days. No way to disable it except to disable all notifications from the game completely.
It is not possible to have a "free market" in health care because the "customers" are often on the brink of death, or not even conscious.
Windows Phone has this option. Apps have a 'Try' and 'Buy' option. Using 'Try' gets you some form of free trial and users can then upgrade to 'Buy'. This avoids the need to have 'Free' and 'Paid' versions of apps.
I've also noticed that some of my comments now seem to be positioned lower than in the past. I had thought that my account might have been flagged or marked somehow, since I definitely don't mind posting a controversial opinion every now and again.

But, a change in the basic comment ranking algorithm seems more likely, especially if other people are also noticing a change. I guess that's actually comforting to know... :-)
Character Through The Years
Every period in life has its own beauty..
$50 says the open-source fork will be called "openginx" :)
(U.S.) states where malpractice damages are limited do not have lower health care costs.
There was a study about that. Basically, those who listen to music are more productive but less likely to think outside the box, and vice versa.
Have you tried grey/pink noise or any of those derivatives?
You are correct. Microsoft stock crashed twice. (It also went down when the bubble went down.)
The constitution also requires fair compensation, which is exactly what Richmond tries to avoid. If they offered fair price, there's no reason why for the bank doesn't make sense to sell distressed properties - banks do a lot of such deals. Banks hate dealing with bad real estate instead of good clean money flows. But it looks like the city wants to force the banks to sell for significantly lower price - they plan to argue that the loan is actually worth below market value, force the sale on that value and profit on it. This is not eminent domain, this is robbery.