skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't agree more. Coming from socialized medicine countries like New Zealand and Australia this is a no-brainer for me. Medicare (which EVERY Australian gets) sets reasonable rates for almost any procedure. They also give Doctors incentive's to charge these set rates. A doctor can charge what they want, but if they do their patients have to pay out of pocket and go to medicare to get compensated. That means less patients choose those doctors. A doctor that charges the scheduled fees is able to "Bulk Bill" that means that the government will transfer payment directly to the doctor (I am not sure how regularly), which means they are likely to have far more patients and really it keeps everything more convenient (No cash on premises, etc.)

On another point, I think that a serious problem is Tort Law. Unfortunately it's such a complicated debate I don't think it could ever be resolved in the US. I personally believe the New Zealand government has this perfect with the ACA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_Compensation_Corporati...). While it is still possible to pursue a civil suit against someone, in the case of a car accident for example. No lawyer is going to do this pro-bono. You have the right to claim medical and loss of work directly from the ACA, therefore the likelihood of a New Zealand judge awarding a large claim would require some serious negligence by the other driver and even then the cost of pursuing that would not be worth the risk. After all, a "normal" person would be satisfied with being medically taken care of and having any loss of income recovered. This will not sit well with those that feel "SOMEONE SHOULD PAY FOR THIS! AND THIS IS THE PAY DAY I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR"
I'm not talking about vitamins in general; I'm talking about vitamin D and how embarrassingly low the U.S. RDA is.

There are a great many Americans who would see immense benefit by taking (say) 1,000 to 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day. And I feel pretty confident there are no people for whom an extra 2,000 IU would be negative.
Its a ploy to promote self-driving boats!
And marginal cost at that, ignoring fixed cost entirely.
Disrupting the Legal Industry
5&6 - it is nonsense to lay the blame for any aspect of the ACA/Obamacare at the feet of the Republicans (they hated on a lot more than the death panels, many things that also came to be). The Democrats own every vote in its favor, and they could have any version of the bill they desired. They are responsible for any perceived problems with the legislation.
One problem I see with people bashing Facebook ads is that it is definitely easy to burn money quickly on Facebook chasing things that seem profitable. For example, we found some very small targeting groups that generated extremely good CPAs initially, but they were so small that once we saturated them, our overall CPA skyrocketed. Once we established what was risky and what was less risky, we've been able to keep our numbers strong - mainly by using Custom Audiences, lookalike audiences, and competitor segments. Facebook also takes much more active management in terms of turning ads on and off than SEM ads. However, a huge pain point for those of us in places where we seem to have come close to maxing out growth from search. Facebook has helped us address this, since it seems like there is a substantial portion of Facebook users who simply haven't heard of us, and Facebook is way cheaper than TV ads.
You've obviously never hit one of the many edge-cases in front-end development that are simply not possible (without an incredible amount of hacking effort).

Multi-line vertical text-centering is a great example (try v-centering a paragraph of variable/unknown height). Or the way text wraps around an image differently at varying widths ("can we make it not break like that? I don't like how it flows at X width"). Or dynamically truncating a block of text and adding an ellipsis automatically, at any given size, in a responsive design.

There are a LOT of examples of "blue sky" design that simply cannot be translated easily, if at all, into HTML/CSS. This is why it's so important that designers have fundamental understanding of the technologies they're working with.
It's impossible to know for sure, but Viaweb is considered to be the first web app.
Same here, it's odd because some books (which I was expecting to find under this promotion) fall in any of these categories:

a) A digital version is already distributed for free at the author's page (not that it makes any difference).

b) A digital version is not even purchasable, but you can find it by illegal means (seriously? I can download the torrent but not purchase the ebook??? This doesn't even make sense!).

c) A digital version is only available at Amazon.
They have a tag for date strings, or you can use seconds from epoch, as an integer _or floating-point_. So if you actually want to represent time with proper fractional seconds, you're stuck representing them as strings. Hardly concise.
The interesting new phenomenon is more and more hackers becoming aware of civil liberties issues.
If you consider yourself a "good hacker", then "anything [you] might find interesting" is exactly what the guidelines say is on-topic:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Couldn't it then be argued that the doctor is incentivized to give short simple treatments so he can work with more patients?
Maybe I misread you. Did you mean a mind that has the energy of a star at its command? Still, that's more energy than you could possibly use. Consider that the sun has far more mass than the rest of the solar system put together, and all of it is extremely hot.
>> There's a lot wrong with blindly throwing money at a Facebook "fan page" and an ostensible following, expecting miracles to happen and any of those followers to care.

This has actually been by far the worst way of making money off of Facebook in my experience - and I do this full time.
> "Then, with enough money saved, [pg] would quit the job and devote his time to his real love—art and painting—until the money ran out, and then he would scramble for another job."

PG, is that what you do between YC batches? When will we get to see some of your paintings? :)
How do you access your relational data from Java?
> not all books are valuable or worth keeping around

Exhibits A & B: http://i.imgur.com/So8rgje.jpg
God I hope you're talking about celsius.
Rust is about long-term strategy. They need it to build Servo, and they need Servo so they have a state-of-the-art browser engine in 5 years.

An unbelievable amount of effort has gone into optimizing Gecko, with impressive results, but ultimately it's an aging, legacy codebase. More importantly, neither Gecko nor WebKit/Blink are ready for a manycore world. As Brendan Eich puts it[1]:

The multicore/GPU future is not going to favor either WebKit or Gecko especially. The various companies investing in these engines, including us but of course Apple, Google, and others, will need to multi-thread as well as process-isolate their engines to scale better on “sea of processors” future hardware.

There’s more to it than threads: due to Amdahl’s Law both threads and so-called “Data Parallelism”, aka SIMD, are needed at fine grain in all the stages of the engine, not just in image and audio/video decoding. But threads in C++ mean more hard bugs and security exploits than otherwise.

I learned at SGI, which dived into the deep end of the memory-unsafe SMP kernel pool in the late ’80s, to never say never. Apple and Google can and probably will multi-thread and even SIMD-parallelize more of their code, but it will take them a while, and there will be productivity and safety hits. Servo looks like a good bet to me technically because it is safer by design, as the main implementation language, Rust, focuses on safety as well as concurrency.

1. https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/
Many of these conferences are a waste of time for startups attending them and Europe is especially guilty of this with many media companies jumping on the bandwagon. Instead of startups being at the center, they simply have become cheap 'content' that are allowed to pose next to corporate sponsors priding themselves of 'loving innovation'.
As someone with an array of absolutely massive fan pages (> 3 million fans on some), that are completely legitimate, I'm getting a viewing percent of < 1%. Unpaid marketing on Facebook is useless. It feels similar to extortion that I've built up so many people who have specifically asked to receive information about my websites/products via Facebook and Facebook wants to charge me over $5,000 PER status update just to reach MOST of my fans. I've learned my lesson on investing into the Facebook platform
I had no idea what NEJM meant. It was noise to me.

Also, link to the original study, rather than some random person's commentary.
Hmm, this is interesting. What we've found is the direct opposite. Facebook is 4 times cheaper than Google for us. But I suppose the nature of our companies are different. We're in the movie industry and Google search on movies that were released a couple of months ago are almost always queries looking for pirated sources.
"Everyone who clicks the 'like' button on a brand's Facebook page volunteers to receive that brand's messages — but on average, (Facebook) only shows each brand's posts to 16 percent of its fans,"

This is due to the way EdgeRank works - you get low exposure if you make page posts that do not get viral uptake. I know people that routinely get over 70% engagement because they make content that people, you know, like.
Yes and no. The idealized invisible hand is built on the axiom that information flows, and the decision makers have feedback to learn from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. When the axiom happens to be mostly untrue, then problems arise.

Medicine is an area where the individual patient can very often not provide useful feedback to themselves or others. It is too technically hard because anecdotes can easily fool individuals, even expert individuals.

Adam Smith himself was both a moralist and an economist. He had a nuanced understanding of the topic, and recognized the tendencies of the invisible hand to go the very bad places, under some scenarios.
Can anyone enlighten me on why number equivalency is a good idea? The spec says that even if you're expecting an integer like 0, encoders can decide to use floating point, and things should just work. One of the first statements is that "7" should be able to be represented in multiple ways. That doesn't seem concise.
I know, but at least when rendered in English, "I am a Wiener" does not work to indicate a city.
On the contrary, it is my morality that makes me content with a cosmic death sentence for any race to commit the crime of endorsing your intensely evil version of morality.

If your views are to prevail, I eagerly await the universe's judgement, sentence, and punishment, for the human race is irredeemable.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/27/facebook-news-feed-ads-gen...

"news feeds ads have a massive 21 times higher clickthrough rates than standard web retargeting ads."

That was just the first results from a Google search of "Facebook ad clicks."

Here's another that only focuses on their YOY improvement, but it's strong evidence that people do click on their ads:

http://mashable.com/2013/10/28/facebook-ad-success-q3/?utm_m...
I like this! A great demo of new standards working in browsers.

As far as 3D audio goes it would be amazing to see an example which delayed audio to one ear based on the different distances from each ear to the source of the sound.

This example just pans the audio - which is still a great effect, but I remember how much I was wowed by the binaural virtual barbershop[1]

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
Number is in Aurora, and color in Nightly.
As someone based in NYC (since 1996) but debating a move to SF, I'd agree. I was here through the .com boom and used to attend NYNMA events (remember those?), but NYC has never really been tech startup-oriented in the way SF is. They've tried, what with billing it as 'Silicon Alley' and all, but it never really seemed to take hold. And the big tech events where they'd have Bloomberg as a keynote and then do a handful of tech demos... the demos would be things that we'd seen before coming out of SF and seemed like copycat products.

A big part of it is the culture here. If you tell someone in NYC that you're bootstrapping a startup out of your living room, the response is 'oh, so you're unemployed'. Do the same in a conversation in SF and people start talking about who might be a good fit for you to meet. So, I wouldn't recommend starting a tech company here.

Don't get me wrong, NYC is a great place for tech. But I'm talking about tech in service to financial services institutions. So, web development, financial software, etc. And mostly around Microsoft tech (ASP.NET, SQL nowadays). I've worked at corporate banks, I've built ecommerce systems, I've built events management systems. They've paid the bills. But the dream change-the-world startup idea? It's just not part of the culture here. Fashion? Absolutely. Food? Sure. Music? Maybe. But tech that's not gonna be a financial services play? I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
This is silly. The notion basically applies to every crowd-sourced service out there.
BusinessReadableDSL
> And JS has some incredible flexibility, with CoffeeScript (CS after) you can even get a more terse syntax similar to ruby/python.

CoffeeScript isn't JS, its a different language that compiles to JS. So what CS can do doesn't say anything about JS as a development language.

> You will not be able to use Ruby or C++ in client-side browser code any time soon.

You can use C++ in client-side browser code now -- sure, you compile it to JS, just as you compile it to native binaries to run on the server side, but the development language can be C++. [1]

[1] https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki
There are a couple other PaaS options as well coming in the near future. For open source options that are currently in development, there's https://flynn.io/ and http://deis.io/. For production-ready Enterprise private PaaS (meaning that you host the PaaS on your own hardware) that are currently ready for production use, there's Stackato (http://www.activestate.com/stackato), OpenShift (https://www.openshift.com/), and Cloud Foundry (http://www.cloudfoundry.com/).

If you're just looking to deploy a single application on Digital Ocean or some other VPS, the digitalocean plugin for knife will really help out (https://github.com/rmoriz/knife-digital_ocean).

EDIT: In regards to Stackato...

-- (1) command-line client for deployment via git
repository and doing anything related to deployment (add new instances, remove instances, create new environments, assign domains to the PaaS router, etc.)

We have a CLI for doing this, as well as a web API and a Python library for communicating with the API (see https://github.com/bacongobbler/python-stackato)

-- (2) clear pricing

We have a clear memory-based pricing plan. This allows users to scale out their infrastructure to as many nodes as they like, and only have to manage their total memory in their clusters to figure out pricing.

-- (3) I can pay for more memory as I need it

It's on your own hardware. EC2/Rackspace/VMWare pricing depends on their model.

-- (4) ability to specify environment variables in a configuration file that take effect on the container process

We have a couple of default env vars in the application container, as well as letting users configure their own envvars. See http://docs.stackato.com/reference/environment.html and http://docs.stackato.com/reference/stackatoyml.html

-- (5) web interface for administering the account

We have both the CLI, the API, and a web interface. Check out our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ActiveStateSoftware for tutorials around the Stackato console, or just take a look at http://docs.stackato.com/ :)

Disclaimer: I work as a product manager for ActiveState, working on Stackato. We'd love to have you over here! We're also on Freenode, channel #stackato if anyone is interested in this stuff :)
Technically, it's not stealing, it's hacking the system. It would be one thing if they were using cracked or stolen accounts, but this is a legitimate loophole left open as a marketing tool.
these are all laudable improvements but nibble around the margins... if Obamacare had cost insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, big pharma, or lawyers a penny it would never have passed.
Stripe is pretty slick and very easy to setup.
Being alone
OOP is Dead Long Live OODD
great to know. however, i am not sure if this concern might be a serious risk. :/
There exists no such thing as social contract. It's made up. Can you prove its existence?
Those are common beliefs and do have some truth to them, but I don't believe they tell the whole story.

Market share is only one part of the equation, the other is effort. Even if linux jumped in desktop adoption that wouldn't make it easier to write malware for, not just because of the security but because of the segmentation. Different distros will have different kernels, patches, libraries and settings that make writing malware that affects the entire ecosystem far more difficult.

With OSX the introduction of malware has never followed market share, although the reasons are more varied for why. One of the biggest reasons, funny enough, is Preview. By not shipping Adobe PDF engines, but writing their own, they've managed to avoid a number of exploits that took advantage of PDF exploits.

This isn't meant to be a conclusive list of differences, but just a couple of examples to show that although market share is a factor it's not even close to the only one there.
There is a problem with a focus on getting "likes". It doesn't convert. Neither does it increase sales. It's a vanity metric. I just wrote a post to explain how small of a mileage like actually brings for the effort exerted. http://thomasdiong.com/post/65443615643/social-media-vanity-...
Having spent a ton of my own money on FB, I can say it does work in many instances, especially with direct response (like what you were trying).

It could easily be targeting too large of a demographic or simply not having ads/landers tailored to your audience. It could simply be a product that is not well suited to selling on Facebook as well, which I've seen plenty of times.
Was Viaweb First?

http://www.paulgraham.com/first.html

http://ycombinator.com/viaweb
I am certain that this will not be a problem. Given the average distance driven in one day, most people can charge overnight with good margin on a 220V outlet. Tesla's supercharging stations currently charge at 135kW DC, and this appears to be upgradable in the future.
MicroUSB can be much cheaper than €3 + shipping(< €1) if you know where to shop [0], because the USB per-device licensing fees are 0.

[0] http://www.monoprice.com/Search?keyword=micro+usb
Yes, that's "death panels" to you Tea Party members following along at home.

Well, now that you've put it that way, the idea of a government-led panel -- rather than the family -- deciding that Grandma is too old to bother treating sounds so much better.
Mozilla had postponed turning on the "block third party tracking cookies by default" feature since May, originally slated for FF22 I believe and it keeps getting pushed back. Anyone know the status of this?
I don't think Mozilla changed release cycles with the intention of getting more cake...
Well it's certainly better. But, as some one who has to run Selenium at work a fair bit (it makes me so sad), I can tell you that Aurora is quite savvy and the memory use never really got out of hand but FF24 still crashes after running a fairly long suite.
I've been in NYC since 1996 and am looking to move to SF for the same reasons. Tech here has always been about financial services and just doesn't gel with the kind of startups you see in SF. I got tired of seeing demos of stuff that had already been done (and better) on the other coast and tired of VCs that just didn't understand software unless it was financial services-oriented.

Or am I missing something? I'd be happy to venture out again and give it a shot.
500 Startups Introduces Batch 007
Agreed. The CNET investigation seemed to have some pretty solid (or, at least, convincing) evidence that these are floating data centers or something similar to that. My sense is that a floating marketing center would be VERY different than a floating data center.

Then again, maybe it's part of the marketing effort? I could see them building a "mock" data center or something like that -- "Step into a Google data center and learn how we'll be powering Glass for the whole world"...
Yeah, plus it's not just thing one thing, but there is a good amount of seemingly little things like this that add up.
Ahh, Marty. He rules and is probably one of the best FB marketers out there.
How to write something meaningful
Funny, the first thing that popped into my mind was "This sounds similar to the iTunes Match program for books." Nice name analysis though :)
I agree that LinkedIn is doing some really cool stuff with their ad tools. However, while the targeting is really useful, people are just less engaged with LinkedIn as a whole. The best piece of advice I got for improving our LinkedIn ads was to target groups, since people that are in the groups pages tend to be much more engaged with the page than anywhere else on LinkedIn. Excited to see where they go though.
Lightning isn't a standard. One company uses it.
Ineffective treatment is visible. The discussion is about cheap effective treatment vs expensive effective treatment.
No wallpaper - just black background. I prefer to minimize distractions.
I would love a smartwatch that acted as a 2nd display for my phone and controlled things like music and workout apps such as Strava. Then I could get updates on my HR, time, speed, music, location, who's calling me, text messages, etc. without having to dig my phone out. When running I use a waist belt with a water resistant pouch because anything else results in my phone getting drenched in sweat and becoming unusable.
As a medical professional I have witnessed this all first hand, to dismiss this as fear mongering is not very accurate. My experience was in the Cardiology field and how they use ultrasound procedures to basically increase the profitability of their practice. This was done by nearly every Cardiology practice in my community. When Medicare cut re-reimbursements of Echocardiograms guess what happened...they all just increased the frequency in which they ordered them. If you don't think a Electrophysiologist has a financial incentive to implant pace makers you're greatly mistaken.
I was thinking less BCC and more the consulting career when I thought that. Not going to point fingers, obviously, but you'd be surprised how little a $X0,000 redesign (from meh to almost-wow) did relative to e.g. changing the H1 on the front page.
Not necessarily. The fractional reserve system is rigged in the sense that to use it you must borrow at interest where the interest can not be paid back resulting in assets transferred to the creators of the currency. Bitcoin does not have this property. In my opinion the system of Bitcoin isn't rewarding certain people over others, that is a property of the market.
> NOT giving these ALLEGEDLY crazed Islamist terrorist criminals the same rights as the rest of us is like spitting in the face of every victim of 9/11.

FTFY
You could try ShareASale : http://www.shareasale.com/

Alternatively, feel free to email me - I may be able to suggest a couple of private contacts.