skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am going to argue with you sideways. :-) I dont think Hello Health is an argument for HSA's so much as a streamlined reimbursement system with some kind or reasonable accountability for costs. The current structure optimizes for assembly line medicine rather than good patient care. Most people go with factory doctors, because of the small co-pay. You can go to a doctor outside your plan, but you typically get only 50% reimbursement. My doctor costs me $100 out of pocket instead of $25, but she is worth it because I get a one-hour appointment instead of 15 minutes.

On to Milton Friedman. He makes a very good case for single payer health insurance (11% of GDP vs 17%) and then comes to the opposite conclusion. He is drinking the perfect market koolaid. He assumes that, if people have to pay their own money, they are going to make rational economic decisions about health care purchases and will shop around for the best price. This is such utter crap that it is hard to believe that an open minded economist would utter it. Health purchases are not rationally economic. They are made on other considerations like trust in the doctor and increasingly on patient evaluations of treatment options. If you have a kid with a high fever, you dont start googling for the best price.

A part of the conservative economic fantasy is that consumers have negotiating power in the market. Yes, I by drugs at Costco because they are cheaper, but that is because Costco has negotiating advantage, not me. A single payer would have a huge advantage in negotiating drug prices. There is a reason that drug prices in the US are the highest in the world.

Health care reform in the US is hugely complicated and a simplistic approach is not going to cut it, even a single payer system isnt enough. Drug costs need to be cut. Defensive medicine needs to be brought in line. (Practice to the patients needs not the doctors.) On and on. Hello Health looks to be a good start in the microcosm.
The Haskell world, as well.
Got this working on my Iphone 3GS. Wow that was easy.
I stopped using USENET in '05 or so. I was mostly interested in discussion and binaries. But it was expensive (I didn't download enough movies or warez or whatever to justify spending $150+/year for access) and hard to find a decent news reader program.
I can't take any analysis of the American health care system seriously when it makes no mention of tort reform.

Compare litigation awards in the US and the rest of the world, or just Canda, and you'll see a huge difference.

This leads to much, much higher health care costs, and the practice of defensive medicine, and most perversely HMOs which can not be sued for denial of care.

That by the way is the only way HMOs can exists at all, by being put entirely out of the legal system.

I am not suggesting that tort reform is the ONLY way to fix health care in America, but it should at least be part of any discussion on the topic.
I also want my browser to be fast and responsive, but the current trend goes in the other direction. How on Earth can you occupy GBs of memory? How much time does it even take to download a gigabyte of data?
I like the idea.

It sounds similar to the labels used by Wikipedia which point out problems with articles (e.g. "This article needs additional citations for verification").
> The article is very interesting in my view. It states that a sampling of the numbers do not follow expected random patterns.

If you try a whole bunch of fairly arbitrary metrics, e.g. how many end in 7, how many end in 5, how many have consecutive increasing digits, and you mine the data into finding two arbitrary ones that random chance would say occur 5% of the time, does that really tell you anything about the data? I find this article a stunning example of the dangers of mathematical ignorance.
Rapid game prototyping
I've got a similar question (I'm a guy in a similar place to cmpeters), so as opposed to opening another HN on a very similar vein.

Like cmpeters, I'm a recent college grad (BEng in Computer Engineering) from a top school in my Western English-speaking non-American country. I've got a good education, a respectable resume, a terrible GPA, and few peer networking contacts (I found people in my program to be boring, so didn't hang out with them). I also can't find a job; most companies that I get through to say - truth or not - that they're in a hiring freeze for the next six months.

I mentioned that I've got no in-industry peer networking contacts, but I have a few very good ones in politics. Specifically, I've got a possible job offer through one to be one of the two or three advance guys for a very senior national politician. It would be a year of traveling around the country with them, likely including an election, and would be incredibly exciting.

My worry is this: if I take this job for a year, will I be aged-out of most positions when I get back? I'm currently a little over 26, and if I do this for a year, would be 27 and a bit when I would be done. Going back into tech/software at that point, I worry that I would be over the normal age for a junior developer position, but would lack the professional experience to be hired as an intermediate one.

I'd like to take this ops job, but worry that I'd be somewhat screwing over my future career. Any thoughts?
Do you have any strong data stating that the final release of some software is in general more memory friendly as opposed to the beta version? I don't have data for the counterpoint either, but I'm willing to bet the developers have other priorities (i.e. bug fixes as opposed to optimization). Once you've maldesigned your software w.r.t. performance, you can't do much except to wait for hardware to catch up.
Nope - the huge memory usage for Chrome is because this analysis is complete rubbish - it's double counting all the shared memory for each process, as you suggested.
From: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thunk

Claimed by the inventors to be from the supposed
past tense, being coined when they realised after
much thought (whence "thunk") that the type of an
argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at
compile time;

Certainly that's what Ingerman said to me.

Related to this, I'm finding myself using "Lunk," "Cluck," and "Drug" as the past tense versions of "Link", "Click" and "Drag". They're easier to say, and most people seem to understand without effort.
Pick your tools for the task. If time and space constraints are critical, use ASN.1 or something terser.

If you need Joe Tech to pop open a wire trace in Notepad and quickly check some value, maybe XML wins.

If you want to view the results as an expandable tree in a some Web browser, perhaps apply a style sheet, maybe XML wins.

If you want free, robust, off-the-shelf parsers with a well-documented API, maybe XML wins there, too.

XML solves a certain set of problems. If those aren't your problems, maybe XML isn't the right choice.
That falls into the "something" category :).
Glad to know it helped you, thank you!
That is a good one, though I fancy this more:

"Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Epitaph on his tomb, probably self composed" -- Shakespeare
Can you tell us if ATT detects it? A comment on the youtube video says they did, but if that's not the case, I may try it out. Seems to be the most slick and easiest way to tether.
Not in Australia. September 6th here.
This scheme would also force those moderating to think enough about their reasons to choose a tag. I am annoyed when I am down-modded for an unpopular argument that adds to the discussion that was seemingly selected for its editorial content rather than its lack of utility. Would someone down-mod me if they had to either (1) choose a false tag or (2) choose a correct tag like "Comment does not adhere to my political views on the matter"? Should up-mods be tagged as well?
why worry? I mean seriously chances are your comment will be upvoted. And if for some stupid reason it gets downvoted, you are only out 8 karma points at most.

Hardly something that'll ruin you or your overall karma score...and its not like Karma even does anything, it affects nothing, so even if you get downvoted, you shouldn't really care.
I imagine that the confusion arose because the two dimensions which varied across the button grid had no relationship to one another.
Erm, might I suggest you reread what I said here, in this particular thread. Which amounted to saying that not all Mibbit users know or care much about IRC. Which is a very silly thing to be taking offense to, let alone demand to be proven.
Agreed - the clear lack of effort to allow or respond to feedback has trained people not to provide it. My alpha testers seem to find it hard to notice the huge "FEEDBACK" link on my site, and after analysing their trajectory through the site, they aren't then telling me anything.

There are lessons to learn here - if you want feedback, you have to pull it. And if someone is willing to give you feedback, make it effortless for them.

And test, test, test, test.
It's not unreasonable to expect that the last two digits of the voting counts should be distributed uniformly. Given that we also know that the wiring in human brains keeps us from properly sampling a uniform distribution by hand, the article employed a simple strategy of looking at the last two digits, assuming they were drawn from a uniform distribution, and asking if that were so, what is the probability that this would be our draw?

You gave no reason to be skeptical, and simply illustrated your lack of familiarity with basic tools of probability. Funny that you would below speak of a "stunning example [...] of mathematical ignorance." If you wanted to substantively contribute to the discussion, perhaps you should try explaining why this was an invalid test instead of just labeling the authors as "numerology detectives?"
> This leads to much, much higher health care costs

Citation, please?

Conventional wisdom is wrong here. It's true that it increases costs, but this doesn't amount to a significant amount of what we pay.
I experimented with it and racked up 400 megabytes in data transfered without even trying (Checked e-mail, visited some web pages).

If AT&T then charges me 0.60/megabyte as stated in the Youtube comment, I'm looking at a pretty hefty bill this month.
http://hnstatus.net/
That's "opioids". And regardless of your intentions, by engaging in vigorous exercise like jogging, you are triggering the release of very similar drugs to those you'd criticised mere sentences before.

I don't mean to beat up on you or anything. Just want to point out that it's all just chemicals. Drugs work, after all, by manipulating your built-in neurophysiology - just as you unknowingly do by exercising. It is ridiculous to arbitrarily discriminate against one category of drug, while recommending another. Any human who wants to be purely drug-free better remove their brain from their body, because that's the biggest drug lab around ..
Am I the only person in the world that prefers large enter key to the small, shift-like, key?
Is there a link to a more technical version of this somewhere? That might settle alot of the debates going on (on this website that is).
I guess this explains how he got into publishing books for programmers/developers. . .

O'Reilly was initially interested. . .but after graduating. . .with a B.A. cum laude in Classics he became involved in the field of computer manuals.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O%27Reilly]
I like it, but I'd want to think a lot more about the way it feels, how it works, and other, perhaps unintended, consequences.

I've mused about this recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662052
poeple could always you know, reply to the comment?
The fundamental problem with economics is physics envy. Its nickname is the dismal science. The goal of economics has been the predictive power of the natural sciences. Well it aint going to happen. First, it is very difficult to run repeatable experiments. You cant have a double blind test to see if HSA's are better than single payer insurance. Friedman looked at the two and concluded that HSA's were better. I looked at his article and my experience with an HSA and concluded the opposite. Second, it appears to me that economics has a lot more in common with chaos theory than Newtonian physics. There are so many variables that it is probably impossible to determine what the initial conditions are. Third, economics is not rational. It has way more in common with psychology and politics than it does with physics, even if money is a nice quantum measurement.

So what's to be done. Look at other attempts and see what works and what doesnt, England and Canada for example. Be conservative. Even though out system is a train wreak, transform it, dont throw it completely away. Make a series of transformations. Assume people are going to game the system in ways that you dont anticipate and make adjustments along the way. It is impossible to design a perfect system; dont even bother to try. Throw away anything that doesnt work.
Of course no idea appears ex nihlio - but I think certain ideas are just so novel and groundbreaking that they mark a qualitative change in humanity (I would include, for example, newtonian physics, relativistic physics, or quantum mechanics.)

I just feel like their were are far fewer (if any) of those truly ground breaking discoveries now than there were in the early 20th century. This might just be perspective bias, but it seems like scientific progress was being made much more quickly from, say, 1850-1950 than any other time in human history.

We still have a lot of big open questions, but progress seems to have slowed down. Hopefully the LHC will change that ...

As for the Grand Challenge, I work in the AI field myself (I'm engaged in some work for DARPA right now, and I know several people who were on Grand Challenge teams), and we're still basically stuck in turing/von-neumann paradigms. In my opinion, most of what we've done in the last 50 years in AI is come up with better search heuristics. It makes AI/ML much more useful - but it's nothing really paradigm shifting.

I will of course grant this could all be in my head, since I haven't, and probably couldn't, define a metric that measures the 'significance' of theory (maybe something about marginal information-theoretic predictive power, but that's difficult to measure and still not quite right).
"A father knows when to be a kid, specially when he needs to be a man"

Play with your kids, if you have them.

Hug your father, while you have him.
My favourite is:

The body of

B. Franklin, Printer

(Like the Cover of an Old Book

Its Contents torn Out

And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)

Lies Here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be Lost;

For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More

In a New and More Elegant Edition

Revised and Corrected

By the Author.

(The Epitaph of Young Benjamin Franklin)
true, but the keys then make a resonant sound which sounds best if you strike with a strong, swift motion.
1. IRC. Thankfully, dropping into an IRC channel is still difficult for casual trolls and spammers and, even if they do, IRC channels are usually heavily moderated.

2. Reddit. Like it or not, some of those subreddits actually have useful content.

3. Lambda the Ultimate for CS news. I'm sure there are similar communities which cater to only one specific subject ares out there.

4. Mailing lists. I'm told some universities have nice mailing lists, and then there are FOSS lists. Let your mail client sort out all the spam.

Look around. Google. I'm sure there are places on the web where intelligent life still exists.
Not everyone uses firefox. However, it could be an option like "noprocrast".
Ask HN:  Why not use technology to find people to talk to at a conference?
The point of conferences is not so much to attend talks but rather to network with people in the field.

In reality, you may end up walking around aimlessly not knowing whom to talk to.

And when you do start up a conversation, there is too much introductory material. The repetition in terms of questions and answers can get annoying pretty quickly.

So why not solve this problem using technology?

Specifically, why not have an iPhone app that lets you find people in the conference room who share your interests? It would help you locate them in the room, learn more about them, determine the probability that they will want to talk to you, give an estimate of likely conversation duration, extent of potential mutual financial benefits, etc.

Why waste your time talking to the wrong people (or not talking at all) at a conference?
Match.com Success Rates published.
I know. Makes me a little sad though.
Neanderthals may have been eaten by early humans
His wisdom [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum?] will not be forgotten as long as it is in text.
I came to the same conclusion. I downvote only if the comment is offensive. If it is wrong or I disagree (and I care) I add my own comment. Downvoting by itself adds nothing to the discussion. I think the current system works remarkably well and I dont feel the need for changes. I fear clutter more.
> What make you think that improvements in technology in the next 30 years will enable machines to crawl under sinks or behind furniture; make estimates about corrosion, or wood grain, or wiring quality; manipulate small, complex items in tight spaces;

A trip to your local Home Depot/Lowes shows that a huge amount of that home construction and repair that used to be a service has already become a user-installable product.

Many of the tight spaces for this stuff is a design decision that can change.
What everyone seems to miss in this is that maybe healthcare shoudl be an increasing percentage of spending. If your basics like food and entertainment are getting cheaper, spending on your health is a good investment (other than simply saving - which you want to eventually spend somewhere anyway before you die).

Would you pay all your life savings to live another five years? most people would.

Or put another way, would you work 20 and give 99 percent of earnings after tax/food/basic living to live another 5 or 10 years? at age 20 you might say no, but on yor deathbed you sure wish you had.

According to this scenario then, a government funded system would be better (a 20 year old would make poor choices thinking death is far away), but should in fact be increasing spending to far higher levels, maybe 50 percent or 80 percent of budget so that we can extend healthy lifespans
You don't think people respond to prices? Consumers are not perfectly rational, but that's a bit of a straw man argument. On average, in the aggregate, they do respond to incentives. On average, in the aggregate, a first-party consumer payer is more likely to be price sensitive than a consumer purchasing medical care by way of a third-party employer health plan. The fact that most consumers don't fit some perfect model doesn't seem particularly relevant.

Finally you say:

"Health purchases are not rationally economic. They are made on other considerations like trust in the doctor and increasingly on patient evaluations of treatment options."

Purchasing based on quality is not "rationally economic"? Have you studied any economics at all? That's just ignorant. You don't know the meaning of the words you are using.

This is why I stopped arguing with people on the internet.

Edit: Yes, this is a little mean and not within the style guidelines of Hacker News, but you will have to excuse me if I am not impressed by yet another person "disproving" the entire discipline of economics with the pseudo-intellectual observation that people make decisions on considerations other than price, as if that fact had been overlooked by every economist for the last three centuries.
Not in those areas, but adjacent, is rec.arts.sf.written
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/topics?pl...

Still the best place for identifying stories you half-remember, and with plenty of active authors and very knowledgeable readers. It does sometimes feel like the last Viking colony in Greenland as the Little Ice Age was kicking in though, surrounded by the howling wasteland that's the rest of USENET.
PG's "On Lisp" back in Print (?)
This makes me sad. AI doesn't need faster number crunching, it needs a more interconnected architecture.
He is using Process.PrivateMemorySize64 in .NET. It doesn't double-count, because it only counts non-shared pages.

Non-shared working set pages are probably the most relevant measure, as a process-per-tab model will have lots of address space and may use memory mapping extensively, and so have lots of non-shared pages, but not actually touch many of those pages, and end up with a relatively small working set. However, .NET's Process class doesn't have an equivalent property to Process Explorer's "WS Private" column.

EDIT: Sure enough, a quick eyeball of some Chrome subprocesses using Process Explorer gives me these results:

Private WS Private
1416 460
14916 7952
12084 9780
16780 13972
16164 11336
14812 12040
10284 4444
19140 15400

All numbers in KB. Non-shared working set impact on an unloaded machine, probably the most important measure for Windows, is usually quite a bit less than the private bytes.
Not in Romania. We don't even celebrate this.
During the experiment, 384 memory checkpoints were taken, which amounts to 1152 seconds or 19.2 minutes.

My problem with Firefox has always been with having the browser open for a long time (days) and running multiple tabs, including having an open Gmail window constantly.

By that point, Firefox is always sluggish and painful. Closing the browser the natural is a waste of time because it takes so long for the memory to free up, and killing the process altogether is the only thing that does anything to buy me some clock cycles.

I'd like to see the results of a long-term test of that nature.
I was unclear - I was using computers as "things that compute". (And assuming that there are things that don't compute, Wolfram notwithstanding.)

One can program things that don't compute such as social entities.
HN remembered. I wonder if my kids will. :-)

(Actually we never paid that much attention to greeting card holidays. So if they dont call, it's my fault in raising them to be all around skeptics.)
Many of these seem pretty easy.

I like that there are two submission-testing tests at the beginning, including the thinly-veiled fizzbuzz.

I do wish there were longer samples, though. (I'm much more interested in the puzzles than applying for an engineering position.)
Blackbox search engine testing
It's really not that important why your comment got up or downvoted. So don't get all worked up about it. Just smile, and go write a new comment on something else.
I agree that the current system is reasonably good, but how and why it works is cultural. That means that as HN gets more popular it will work less and less well.

I'm frequently mystified by why a comment gets down-mud, and wish desperately that there were a simple mechanism for people to tell me why. I have no complaint, I accept that someone feels the comment should be down-mud, but I'd like to learn why they feel like that, and what it is they think I got wrong. Maybe I'll disagree, but at least I can learn from it.
In college I used every single drug I could get my hands on, for both academic and recreational purposes, and I can tell you as an expert that coffee is still the most effective and alcohol is the most fun. The rest aren't worth it.
It doesn't work nearly as well if you compare survival rates for serious illnesses.
Monster.com's resume service was horrible, at least in 2005. It did give me some good ideas to build off of, though.
> Would you pay all your life savings to live another five years? most people would.

Some would rather pass it on to their children, you know.

Besides, why should we be so scared of death?
An interesting debunking:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001434.html
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001435.html