skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are poorly understood neurological disorders that can cause hypersensitivity to sound, which can present as being easily distracted by sound. See misophonia as an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia).

I'm not saying everyone who yells at you for being loud suffers from this condition, but when you say, "Stop blaming externalities for your inability to concentrate," it smacks of telling the clinically depressed to just think happy thoughts and cheer the fuck up.
Well, I think it would have to start somewhere. I'd be happy to be able to comparison shop for routine, non-emergency stuff...let's say dentists to start off with. I have a feeling that once you start chipping away at it, the outlying examples would get taken care of as well.

There was a similar thread a few weeks back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6258597

It'd be great if the HN community started throwing out some ideas for disrupting this behemoth.
How do you explain other free markets that obviously deliver quality products at low prices? I don't feel gouged when I buy a television, a cell phone or lumber at Home Depot.
I coded from essentially an open warehouse for several years with shop noise, sewing machines, various noise generating machines, packing tape noise and people. Talking on the phone was difficult, let alone CODING. I honestly feel like I might have some noise sensitivity complex from working in that environment for so long. Tried not to complain, but my noise cancelling headphones were the only thing that allowed me to be productive. I eventually got an office and that helped considerably. I don't work for that company anymore.

I work from home now and it is the opposite spectrum, I get total piece and quiet, I love it. I can't say enough about a good pair of over the ear noise cancelling headphones though if you find yourself sensitive to noise.
Well you can hardly have a free market for healthcare in the first place. A functional market requires that consumers be vigilant and make good choices. That's hard enough without being sick or injured.

I like to think of myself as a free markets guy, but driving healthcare via the market seems like the worst, most cynical application of the concept possible.
Yeah, my understanding is that the French knew very well that the Germans would go around; the Line was only meant to force them to detour through rough country and slow them down long enough for the French Army to mobilize. It failed because the Nazis used unprecedented tactics and technology to storm through Belgium and the Netherlands faster than anyone thought they could; the French Army still knew they were coming, but weren't able to mobilize fast enough to stop them.
It is written to a prior version of the Common Lisp standard, and with a very old-fashioned style. You'll see calls like (REPLACA pair val) instead of (SETF (CAR pair) val) and so on. That will irk you if you are a Common Lisp hacker already. If you're not, just keep in mind that good CL style results in somewhat prettier code than that in On Lisp.
Author here.

Still active, although development has slowed down.

If you have any questions or issues just submit an issue @ Github and I'll help asap.
>cell phones that overheard you say, "the government is too big".

This is the position of a majority of the House of Representatives. That's more than a little paranoid.

If your car finds it unusual for you to be driving late at night, it will be because your private auto insurance company realized it could run a higher profit margin by not paying out claims that result from nighttime accidents, the competition agreed, and consumer protection is considered too "big government" to implement.
> Under US protocols.

I wasn't only talking about the US. There are many other countries in the world who own nukes and where their usage protocol is different.
Thanks for finding that!

Here's an accessible text version:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/france-builds-worlds-greatest...
Well presumably you're not suffering from an ailment that requires immediate application of TV, Angry Birds or a 2x4 in those cases.
It's funny, because you seem to think that health care professionals, with their myriad Excel spreadsheets and mammoth stacks of Steelcase® file cabinets brimming with rainbow color-coordinated folders containing paper files seem to know the first thing about information security.

These are non-technical people, who went to school mostly for biology and chemistry, or for the lowly clerks, and secretaries in your doctor's office, maybe two years of community college, with an associates degree in communications maybe. On average, take a random sample of the people who do the paper work for the lofty, priest-like physicians. Ask them what AES is, or what a SHA hash is, or even what SSL and TLS are. I guarantee you, that you'll get a blank stare.

They know how to use the systems they're provided with, like they know how to open a bag of Oreo cookies. The doctors know how to pay IT professionals for services, like they know how to write a check, and know to procure electronic systems like they know how to make down payments on their Mercedes. You can be sure that they know how to shred all those e-mails that they print out and read over their morning coffee.

It's only as private insofar as no one is supposed to look. This protects people under the law, in that, as a rule, certain information is not to be used as criteria for making certain business decisions. But this is merely a bureaucratic honor system, and it doesn't mean that people aren't aware of things they aren't supposed to know about. The information itself, frequently, isn't particularly "secure" according to more strenuous information security standards. Your credit card transactions are safer than your HIPAA information by a longshot, but mostly because there really isn't any sort of criminal profit motive behind obtaining and using that sort of information.
I wear earplugs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0033YLEGO?ie=UTF8&ref_=pd_...

At work they're just enough for me to be able to concentrate while still allowing people to get my attention without raising their voice. At which time I take them out and repeat what I heard of their question.
Film on Salinger Claims More Books Are Coming
And herein lies the true problem of medicine in America. We have the worst possible healthcare system. It is a privately run industry without any real competition. Almost anything would be better - either public healthcare or real competition. Instead, what we practice in America is an exercise in insanity played out on sick and injured.
To be fair, Windows isn't the only desktop environment to throw away old interface designs and adopt new ones that many wish could be disabled.

Not saying it's a good (or bad) think in either case (as I don't know) but it's certainly not a unique-to-microsoft thing.
No need to use ebs/snapshots for backups.

Use wal-e and/or pg_receivexlog. Ideally run pg_receivexlog on a server at a different provider so that if amazon cancels your account your data is up-to-the-second recoverable.
There was a really, really good (depressing) article I'd read about a year or two ago talking about how group purchasing organizations worked to influence the costs of devices.

The example case was a guy who'd developed an auto-retracting needle, and was screwed out of business by some major manufacturers pressuring hospitals not to buy it.

Does anyone have a link to that article?
and Hackerbooks on github : https://github.com/ekianjo/HackerBooks?source=cc
Apparently, a bidding war. Fancy that. http://kfor.com/2013/07/08/okc-hospital-posting-surgery-pric...
Tutor reveals Ivy-admissions madness of rich penthouse parents
This is exactly what I do, as do many folks at my office. I just don't use quite as colorful language. :)

The only downside is that if you use them too much, you might get the reputation for being someone who doesn't have time for questions from colleagues.

At home, I just recently replaced my fraying HD280 Pros with a pair of HD380 Pros. Recommended!
That one made it into production.

Open up a google doc spreadsheet, type the words in a column, then use the little pull-down at the bottom right. Lists of languages, ponies, whatever will autocomplete.
I actually discovered this yesterday and spent Saturday morning learning about it. I really like most of the syntax, especially the "var/const/let" distinction together with "if/when". I'm sort of wish that Rust and Go would just copy that. The semantics seemed to be up to par with this generation of potential C replacements, but not any better than the others.
You like the Koch brothers on Facebook and don't even know it
If even half of the professionals who use open source products would budget even small amount (like $100) to distribute between their favorite open source projects per year, we would not have this conversation. Seriously, Is it so hard to spend less than hour per year (around Christmas maybe) to voluntarily subscribe to the tools you like.

Investment to learn some software tool at expert level can easily be $10,000 - $30,000 when you distribute the cost of learning all the details over several years.

This has lot to do with the reason why people start using open source products. They are not just looking if the code is open source just now. What they want is community that guarantees the long life and continued development that justifies the continued investment to learn and keep up with the tool.

I have invested significant amount of personal time for learning to use stuff like Gnu Emacs, Linux, coreutils, C, R, Matlab, Common Lisp in general and SBCL in particular etc. Investment to these things pays dividends that can be measured in significant money. It looks like communities involved are alive and work towards goals I like, so I donate.
Emergency care has to be just a piece of the cost pie. People shop around for health care all the time, including for very expensive things like childbirth.
OT: It's truly a sad day when I have to check to make sure that I'm reading something in a news section and not the op/ed section of the grey lady.
Nimrod looks a lot like someone took Borland's ObjectPascal and removed the begin/end block semantics in favour of whitespace indentation.

For example, they use the "var: type" syntax; the syntax for declaring classes is nearly identical; "case [value] of" is right out of Pascal, as is the "0..2" range syntax. They refer to "procedures" as opposed to functions. They even use naming conventions from ObjectPascal: "T" as a prefix for types (eg., TChannel), "P" for the Nimrod equivalent to pointers (eg., PChannel is a "ref TChannel"), "F" for class members.

I would not be surprised if the author was an old Turbo Pascal/Delphi hand.
Yeah, very true. My grumpiness gets the best of me sometimes.:(

I guess I wish the HN response to a Gruberish article would be people analyzing it for what it is, not people gloating about how they think their team is, uh, winning or whatever, then arguing about the numbers that they think proves it. Maybe the post I was responding to was some sort of pro-Android Gruber parody or something. If that's the case, then it was awesome, because it really captured some very subtle nuances about how that brand of commentary operates.
Many years ago, I had cubicle next to phone order takers while writing software for the company. Prior to that I had worked from home for several years so it was a difficult adjustment for me. After repeatedly asking for an office and being rebuffed, I offered to quit instead and got an office the next day. I think my productivity shot through the roof then. I left as soon as I finished the software; the environment was simply not condusive to thinking.
Treading a New Path for Reproducible Research: Part 1
http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/4/361.short

"The social inequalities in health have endured or even worsened comparatively throughout different social groups since the 1990s.... Health policies mainly promoting equal financial access to healthcare have little chance of abating health inequalities. "
I don't think he meant to imply such a sudden disappearance (technological rapture?). All of Microsoft's core products are generic and replaceable, and it's easy to imagine other companies making them instead.
Cell phones are a great example of the terrible results from supposedly free markets.

Plans are deliberately priced to be confusing to compare prices; plans are frequently updated to cause people to be stuck in win-optimal contracts; consumers are gouged on some items (see bizarre cost of sms in UK); and companies collude to defeat market mechanisms - see the use of area codes in auction bids as a method of communication when frequencies were auctioned off.
The Boomers will die (of substandard health care) in another decade or so. That will change politics quite a bit.
The best (and bluntest) book I know of in this area is Career Warfare http://www.amazon.com/Career-Warfare-Building-Successful-Bat...
What happens when you win The Price Is Right?
If you're the sort of person who thrives in a quiet atmosphere or is really sensitive to sound, I can't recommend Bose QC-15 noise canceling headphones enough. They've totally transformed my life and I still lament for the days of productivity I lost while living in ignorance of their existence.

Even when I'm not listening to music, they take the edge off of the all the sound and noise around me so that even conversations happening within earshot aren't distracting, even though I could tune in and understand what people are saying if I wanted to. It's pretty amazing.
Free market decisions will work when the patient has a choice. For example, when going for an outpatient visit to a doctors office that is scheduled in advance. One could argue that the patient has time to review their choices, call different providers and come to a decision.
This is not the case when the patient is being urgently hospitalized. They are typically rushed to the closest medical center and are subject to the prices it charges and it's providers charge. Given that they have no choice, whatever system it is that leads to these high prices is unlikely to change - if you are forced to buy something from me, why wouldn't i charge you as much as i feel like for it?
The government could get involved and force hospitals to adhere to a certain fee schedule - but why should for profit institutions have to adhere to this? In a truly capitalistic society they really shouldn't. The best ways to deal with this is to maximize insurance coverage, which is one goal of the affordable care act, and then to really use it as insurance and not to pay for every possible medical service a patient may require. Insurance companies will negotiate reasonable rates for hospitalizations. And if it's really being used as insurance and not to cover regular outpatient services, premiums would remain low as well.
So would there still be stories of the $4 Tylenol tablet dispensed in the hospital? Probably - but in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't matter as much.
Free markets are a problem when there is a resource that can be monopolized (doctors / medical supplies) or when corporate goals are at direct odds to community interest (a deregulated BP despoiling the Gulf of Mexico because safety measures are expensive and fuck you.)

Home Depot would happily gouge you if they could form a cartel and gain enough control of the supply chain.
Visual rendering of first 100 billion digits of pi proves randomness
The cadence of your post implies to me that you're exposing some sort of hypocrisy on my part.

My entire point was that I had gotten all riled up about something being dumb, but that something had caused me to think in a way atypical of dumb things.
Of the healthcare that is delivered, most is non-emergent.
Given that it's a mathematical topic, interesting use of the word "prove"
I was disappointed to discover that. I knew about semantic satiation, but hoped someone had come up with a clever parody term.
May there be a throng of distraught weeping bankers and insurers at your funeral, sir.
They announced that they will add face detection/tracking. This sensor is fully open--- software, firmware, hardware, schematics, PCB layout, everything
And then there's hyperquest because maybe you want to do more than five simultaneous requests:

https://github.com/substack/hyperquest
OT

how is arc progressing?
The Decline of E-Empires
Sure. It's perfectly right, except it's illegal, much like lying on your tax forms or robbing banks.
Great work it was tons of fun
There was just a big NY Times article on the cost of childbirth. Turns out its extremely hard to shop around. Not only is it much more expensive in the US than in any other country to give birth, but, with a few exceptions, it's very difficult to get pricing information in advance. To quote:

>When she became pregnant, Ms. Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-bir...
> When the satellite is in orbit around the moon and visible from Earth, one of three ground stations will shoot a laser towards its approximate location. The laser beam from Earth will scan a patch of sky and should illuminate the spacecraft at some point. When that happens, the spacecraft will begin transmitting its own laser towards the ground station and the two will lock on to each other. Once that happens, communications can begin.

Cool handshake.
Wasn't MSRA behind that amazing live English-to-Chinese translator [0]?

It's interesting to contrast Google's and Microsoft's approach with ours at Wolfram Research (at 0.3% their size, of course [1]).

We've come to see that it is very fruitful to live in a murky space somewhere between "commercial product" and "research project".

I'm thinking specifically about Wolfram|Alpha.

It's an enormous and daunting project. We've tackled a lot of very hard problems, and obviously have a long way still to go.

It has the weird property of being a thing that ships every week, but not one that the parent company depends on financially.

And so we kind of do our own thing, encoding domain knowledge, adding content, curating data, and designing frameworks, even if some if it won't ever make us any money (e.g. who will ever pay for dog
vision [2]). We mostly just do things because they're cool or fun.

But it's been incredibly useful to drive innovation elsewhere in the company.

For example:

1. Alpha's unit system (the best in the world, the authors claim) is already in Mathematica 9.

2. Alpha is inspiring us to bring high-level semantic data and reasoning to Mathematica 10.

3. The automatic analysis in Pro is being souped up and will form part of Mathematica's predictive interface (automatic suggestions to "perform logistic regression", and so on).

4. We're working on taking the natural language understanding frameworks we've built for Alpha and using them to translate natural language queries into structured SQL or hierarchical document queries.

5. The domain specific languages we've invented to represent things in the real world are going to be exposed in a soon-to-be open format we're calling the Wolfram Data Format (which I hope will succeed where RDF is failing).

We wouldn't have though of any of this stuff without Alpha. And it wasn't explicitly driven by either commercial or basic research, but rather some kind of eccentric blend of the two.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600+people+%2F+%28numbe...
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apply+dog+vision+to+ima...
Also, the British forces that were supposed to be guarding the Western route into France folded quickly and retreated. "Blood, Tears, and Folly" contains exceprts from contemporary sources noting that the British determination to retreat was such that they prevented French troops from redeploying to their Western flank so as to avoid the French defence impeding the British retreat.
I've never been too successful with polyphasic sleep, at least not the hardcore type (6x20m naps). That said, a lot of very successful people have adopted biphasic sleeping, taking a shorter core nap (4 to 6 hours) with a nap during the day. I think this is a better approach, especially if you're in a field where you use your brain a lot. Taking a 30m nap can do wonders after lunch.
But people don't find that stuff on the internet. it is presented to them via sites like digg, reddit, HN, b3ta, etc etc.

curation is important.
Wouldn't any algorithmic queries ultimately also be initiated by a human? Unless we're dealing Skynet, some human or group of humans would have had to come up with the question time consuming enough to require automated analysis, code up the algorithm to process the data, run the algorithm and ultimately review the results. Any violations should be able to be attributed to an actual human.
Errr, I thought I did above, at least as a start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273984
Simple. Google hopes to woo Hulu, HBO and others. They can't if they keep it open.
"My Firefox OS app was rejected for using potentially unsafe code in a priviliged app"

You can still develop for Android with cordova instead.
Do you have a cell phone? If the results of this particular market are so terrible, why does virtually everyone elect, of their own free will, to buy a cell phone?
It doesn't have to be percentage, just seeing "x many bytes downloaded (out of unknown maximum)" increase is seeing progress. Seeing a spinner spin around may mean x is going up, or x is exactly where it was 30 seconds ago, but the spinner is made to always spin anyway.
I'm not sure if you're trolling, but have you seen WWDC in the past year or two? The innovation in OS X and iOS is at an amazing rate.
It seems to me that the parlous state of the US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market

I... I just... wow.
Anatomy of a hack: even your 'complicated' password is easy to crack
Dispatch From The Future: Uber To Purchase 2,500 Driverless Cars From Google
Use smaller boxes for books, and buy or hire a sack truck.
However, if you ARE looking for a "teach yourself Lisp in 24 hours" type of book, you could do a lot worse than "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel (http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Common-Lisp-Peter-Seibel/dp/...).
> places like a noisy restaurant or cafe.

This is an opinion, but it seems this can make it easier for some. Because it's a constant noise that doesn't often change much, you eventually tune it out. It feels like it's the sudden change in ambient noise that causes a break in concentration. I use white noise, or a rain noise generator (they both do well for me) to get this same effect while studying.
Agree, I've used this syntax on my last 2 projects. It is so much better, and closer to Node/CommonJS, I don't know why anyone uses the alternative.
Would this be the same free market that put a Cray 2-class computer in my pocket for $85/month?
It's written to be over-the-top, but I agree with the sentiment that we cannot fight government eavesdropping with "even better" technology.

The only thing that limits the law is the law; the solution to our problems, at least in the U.S., must in the end be political not technological IMO.
I don't know, I saw that you said you haven't read a book in months - I thought maybe you had one in mind.

If not, I recommend "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. It's not a taxing or immensely intellectual read, but it's a great adventure story with very interesting and suspenseful parts. It's a lot of fun to read and definitely won't feel like work - it'll feel like play.
There isn't, but it is quite strongly (looking for remote opportunities since 2009)
I have this same problem. In a quiet environment, I'm distracted by every single noise. In a busy, noisy environment, I'm undistractable.
It works if you put a * space * around your stars.

Or you can make a *literal* line by putting two spaces before it.
Air travel still worked while it was regulated.