skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your entire answer is basically what TV tells you to think of doctors after watching numerous sitcoms about them. Doctors exist in other countries, they manage to learn the same amount and some are apparently better than their US counterparts [1]

Moreover, I said "heathcare providers", not "doctors". Every piece of medical equipment, from an artificial joint to a scalpel, goes through a lengthy list of middlemen each making a healthy margin.

Walk into the oncology clinic (the same ones who accept donations from various "X to cure cancer!" events) and take a look at price of the hardwood they put in. That's your "cure cancer" money and it has nothing to do with "doctors should cost a lot".

Healthcare lobbyists is the problem, but I'm just pointing out the easiest signs everyone can see. It's not rocket science: if you think obesity is the problem, look at the cost of giving birth. If you think insurance companies are the problem, try to get an MRI independently. If you think cost of education is the problem, look at the degree a jet-owning medical equipment salesman holds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranki...
Initially it was just the best at what it did, pretty much leaving all others behind. I didn't hate yahoo, but they got smoked. And remember the "AOL keyword"? I think we romanticize here a little bit, I don't remember Microsoft being the enemy early on, as disliked as they were.
I don't think Google is "evil" but I do think it really all comes down to how Google makes their money. They are not like Microsoft or Apple, who actually sells things to end users.

I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.
Excusing the originality inherent in the idea of a laptop form factor "phone extension" device that plugs into your phone via MHL, of course.

What would you have it look like? Thinner? Thicker? Less metal? More metal? Disband the thought that somebody make a small metallic clamshell with a screen and a keyboard - they're ripping off Apple!
Not directly, but can support related projects: microryza.com
It depends what it's doing. Other languages are much better at data processing. They make it more complicated to start child processes, use pipes, set environment variables, etc. If you're doing system administration tasks, you'll end up with a lot of shell command lines embedded in the program. (Try editing a crontab in Python...)
I was born in 1987
Ah ok, this makes sense. I thought it was strange to highlight it as the developer didn't appear to be receiving any benefit from doing so (as opposed to "Only on Xbox" games getting special treatment from Microsoft).
> (...) the biggest problem by far is that git is dangerous out of the box - it can destroy your work very easily or leave you in an unrecoverable state.

It's almost impossible to leave git in "an unrecoverable state", short of actually deleting your ".git" directory.

If you do wind up in a bad spot, that's what the ref-log is for [0]. If you've made an error that is difficult or complicated to unwind, no sweat: hit the reflog and go back in time to the point where things were the way you wanted.

git is many things -- frequently useful, often complicated, sometimes obtuse. But it's almost always safe.

[0]: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-reflog....
I tried to create an account the other day and they explicitly required a mobile phone number they could send an SMS too.

I suspect that different people see different behavior.
1) 20% time still exists. I used it to write an HTML parser [1] that's had some modest success, and I have coworkers that have 20%ed on robotics, quantum computation, elementary school education, Project Loon, Flu Trends, and a variety of other interesting things. Google Now came out of a 20% project. It is something that you have to take a lot of initiative on to pull off successfully, but the opportunity is still available.

[1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
My comment about them is how they're perceived in the industry, in reality they may be great places to work.
Comprehensive, well written article.
One of the first commands I type into a new VPS:

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

I remember when I got my very first VPS, and within a couple of days I was getting a really long bruteforce where the attacker tried every common name "aaron, adam, alex, etc" and around 120 common passwords for each of them (fortunately my text-based password on that VPS was 41 characters). I think they tried a few thousand usernames total. That's when I realized the internet is a scary place, and now I only use RSA keys.
Ads are _fundamentally_ evil? What mechanism do you propose for bringing new products to the attention of customers, then? Or are new products and/or customers also fundamentally evil, IYHO?
Patients are the wrong people to drive costs down.

"Why are you re-canularising me? Why am I being charged for this extra un-needed canula procedure? Just leave the old one in" etc. Doctors can assess the research, and can decide whether the risk of infection from old canulas balances the risks of new canulas, and whether the cost is worth it or not.

Here's a radio programme (no longer available from the BBC website, but may be somewhere else on the Internet?) about an Indian hospital that does a lot of work to drive down costs. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039yz53

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10837726

> "We believe that the only way is to build large hospitals - 100 or 200 beds are not going to be the solution for the current world health problem. We need to build large hospitals where hundreds of operations are carried out every day."

> And here in Bangalore, the theory appears to work. Despite the huge volume of operations, mortality rates are comparable with or better than those in Britain and the US, and costs are much lower.
> Do we need source-control on our source-control?

That's more or less what Mercurial's changeset evolution [1] is/will be (it's not enabled by default yet).

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution
I'd be very worried about a system like this in that it discourages preventative medicine, which is much more cost-effective on the long run.

If people have a minimum copay, they're far more likely to hold off until treatment is urgent—and, thus, much more expensive.
It's NOT a trivial problem, though. There's evidence that other mammal species are also experiencing obesity epidemics, even though their diets haven't changed: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/david-berreby-obesit...
I'm guessing the reason you're getting downvoted is because it sounds like you don't know how to use git. That may not be true, it just sounds that way.

> the biggest problem by far is that git is dangerous out of the box - it can destroy your work very easily or leave you in an unrecoverable state.

Please explain. How is it dangerous? How can it leave you in an unrecoverable state?

> why can't i roll back a merge in one step if i didn't configure things to be able to do that?

Depending on how many commits the merge had it'd be something like

git reset HEAD^^ --hard

> why does my branch disappear when i merge?

What do you mean? That the branch you merged into doesn't indicate which commits were done on the other branch? Branches don't disappear.
As far as danger goes, I've never got into a state I couldn't back out of using the reflog - though the user experience surrounding getting there and back could definitely use some polishing.

As far as having mutable histories, from the standpoint of someone who has to review and integrate lots of branches from a large distributed team, its amounts to a necessary evil. It's difficult to review and merge anything more than a concise set of changes that achieve their end goal and it's also difficult to have committed such a changeset on the first try. Not having the team rebase out experimental and exploratory commits would be a huge mess and while it's an option to just wait to commit until you're done, that risks losing things, and leads to giant one-shot patches that can still be tricky to review and ship.

I'm not sure what workflows hg users that loathe to alter history adopt where they don't suffer from trying to integrate messy branches.
http://troll.me/images/obama-meh/y-u-mad-bro.jpg
I had a Clamcase Pro for about a year. Its the only keyboard case that isn't terrible.

When mine broke it was because of my own negligence, but if anyone buys one of these, keep in mind that the company only offers a 90 day warranty, which is very short for a $150 keyboard. This new product is probably going to cost at least $100 more.

Clamcase has a reputation online for refusing to support their products outside of this window, even though some of their products are known to fail all of a sudden for no reason.
Geode from iCache (2012)
Those are some great newsletter recommendations!

Anyone have any more?
One query works:

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998
The very first time I tried Linux, after spending an entire day downloading Slackware, copying it to a set of install diskettes, partitioning a hard drive and installing it, I set my root password to "12345".

I was around 10 at the time, 1995 plus or minus a year or two.

After booting for the first time, I dialed up AOL and logged on to a Linux-topic IRC channel. I talked to the strangers there about how excited I was to try Linux for the first time.

I quit my IRC client and typed "ls". Command not found. I tried "uptime". Command not find. "cd". Command not found.

While I was on IRC, someone had telnet'd in, guessed my stupidly simple password, and rm -rf'd the whole hard disk. I cried over breaking the computer and had to be consoled by my parents. I never used a common password again.

I now miss the days when hackers and viruses alike just wanted to delete your files or print messages on your screen. Secretly taking over your still-functioning system is much nastier.
Per the Python 3 docs (for some reason not in the Python 2 docs, but the same holds): "Only the memory consumption directly attributed to the object is accounted for, not the memory consumption of objects it refers to."

Most of the space for the NonSlotted version is in the __dict__, and if you print the size of ni.__dict__ you'll probably get a couple of hundred bytes.

There are better, recursive ways to get the real size of a Python object in memory, for example see: http://pythonhosted.org/Pympler/asizeof.html#asizeof
Nobody is saying you have to squash, it's just recommended to tidy changehistory. For all of your projects, you can simply not squash, and ask contributors to do the same. It's not like git rewrites history automatically...

Just because git will let you shoot yourself in the foot, doesn't mean that it's a tool that should be avoided.
>3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page

Someone can use Google+ and love Google+ and empathize with others who might not feel the same way. Regardless, it's entirely irrelevant. He doesn't mention Google+ once in the post.
And I'd argue that if books did have syntax highlighting, parts of speech wouldn't be the best way to inflect it anyway. Maybe give a colour to each each character, or each location, or even just the subject of a sentence. Which "her" does this refer to? Which speaker is this? These are all potentially valuable things.

And some books do do these things. Often thoughts are italic whereas spoken words are quoted. Pratchett puts Death's words in all caps.
Is it "complain about HN week" ? If you got problem with HN stop reading it, simple as that. We don't need your "awesome" advices how to read stories on HN, we don't need to hear that HN sux.
I dont think anyone here got problem with filtering the content, if you dont want to read another startup stories you just don't. I do not see any problem here.

Hacker News is still awesome community, people here usually have awesome attitude. It keeps me motivated.
> I see the appeal of maintaining a clean history, but shouldn't that be done in some non-destructive fashion?

Don't rebase code that is public (few people recommend that you do) and there is nothing destructive about it. When I rebase my changes before making them public, I am not destroying history, I am deciding history.
That particular case isn't vulnerable to length extension, since the key is placed at the end of the message. This MAC breaks down, however, when the function used is not collision-resistant.

HMAC offers some level of protection against collision-weak hash functions, and that's why you can still use HMAC-MD5 today and be pretty OK (although I don't recommend it!).
Silencify
Compared to Coin, the Geode project had a similar vision albeit with greater aspirations. Here is an article about the aftermath: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130331/PC05/13033992....
Their pricing model grates at me. You want to charge more to read your content in mobile apps in addition to normal web pages?
In Congo, I'm sure, the name "Leopold" is a bigger evil then Hitler. In the west, Hitler is the greatest evil because the victims are much closer to them. In Congo, I'm sure, not everyone knows who Hitler was. So, yes, in the west Leopold isn't called "Hitler" as true as in Congo Hitler is not called "Leopold".
This is mostly from people mistaking the search box for the address box and just putting in the URL there and not knowing there's an extra step in this that they could avoid.
I stopped reading at "I'm not female, so I don't have to worry about getting thousands of rape threats every month". Inserting unsubstantiated claims for shock value into an argument just detracts from any other points he is trying to make.
The main risk factors for cirrhosis are alcohol and hepatitis B and C. The UK doesn't have a worse drug problem than the rest of Western Europe, consequently it must be the drinking.
Source is on github over at https://github.com/joshrendek/scala-ifcfg-api

If you have play 2.2.1 in your path its as simple as running `play dist` and moving the zip over to your server, and running the shell script play creates :)
Keeping Pace With New Web Technologies and Techniques
On Wall Street, the fake love often turns to a company being out of favor quickly (with both directions being equally irrational, in the overvaluing and then undervaluing). Indeed, the less fundamentals you have propping you up, the more likely this is to eventually happen, and happen hard. That exact scenario has played out numerous times with Netflix, for example.

Amazon's valuation is almost purely an emotional basis, as all future returns are being pulled forward to the extent that they're overvalued and the calculations about their future earnings expectations are correct. Is Amazon worth $50 billion? $100b? $168b? That's an emotional judgment today, as they have no profits and little history of profitability, and if you want to speculate on tomorrow... well if their valuation keeps bubbling up, they'll soon catch Walmart, which has $17 billion in annual profit (meaning it may only take... 20 years or so for Amazon to fully realize that market value via profitability). Amazon is going to be an excellent short at the end of this stock market bubble, they'll lose half their value on the down swing (my opinion).

However keep in mind, this is not a company that has always been loved by Wall Street. For most of its life, it has been hated by Wall Street. If you run an average price from early 2003 through the end of 2008, the stock was essentially flat lined for five years. And obviously it was viewed with near universal disgust after the dotcom bubble imploded, and the stock cratered to the $5's after 9/11. Amazon.Toast and all that.
John, thanks for the Hacker Newsletter mention!

Of course I'm a bit biased, but I think curated newsletters provide a lot of advantages, several of which are listed in the post. Another one that I would add is the ability to focus on a particular topic or area that you find useful. I created a (curated) list of a lot of them recently - http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-....
Maybe I'm just jaded and never really saw Google as a a nice company with good intentions, but I just can't be sad about Google's new directions.

My suggestion to everyone who's worried about Google: other companies would be really happy to service your needs. There are other companies offering e-mail services, ad services, internet search (the one thing there's no absolute replacement for yet[1], but with your patronage, a new competitor could get there), internet messaging, website analytics, maps, mobile operating systems... and new companies could appear in these areas.

> Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people?

I dislike their new real names policy, but: human faces. Humans are drawn to other humans' faces. That's why they're pushing to use Google+ photos on ads. Also, people are drawn to names of people they know. That's why they nudged website owners to associate their domains with their personal Google+ accounts. They're essentially trying to make their services more like a social network so people discover YouTube videos while browsing YouTube, not Twitter or Facebook, for instance.

A simpler explanation: Google is trying to remain relevant and grow even more using the same magic that made Facebook big: your friends.

[1]: In my experience, DDG is good at searches related to programming, mediocre at searches related to non-tech stuff, and terrible at searches in languages other than English. It's getting better, though.
I must admit i liked mercurial a lot. The simplicity that is underrated (of svn) is found in tons in mercurial. In fact dvcs initially was hard to get my head around conceptually with git. Keep in mind the unlearn part is harder from years of svn. Then i actually read a tutorial on Joel Spolksky's website about mercurial and how FogCreek uses it. That really helped me conceptually with dvcs.
They used to enforce that, but then relaxed the requirement a (year?) ago. Since then there's been a lot more marketing shots instead of screenshots showing up in app listings.
If your comment gets downvoted, it's much more likely to be because it is simply inaccurate.

Git is remarkably safe out of the box. Git makes it damn near impossible to lose anything other than intentionally. No matter if you rebase, reset --hard, or any other "destructive" operation, you can always get back to your prior state with nothing but a quick look in the reflog. Even if you start doing the really dangerous stuff like filter-branch, there again Git goes to pains to prevent you from losing data, by creating a refs/original folder to preserve your old refs (though you can also just use git fsck). Git goes above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to preventing data loss. Short of intentionally running the garbage collector with --prune=all right after rebasing, you won't lose data.

As for the core concepts being the same, you're talking about usage whereas the person you quoted was talking about the actual implementation-level object model. Git's model is remarkably simple, and that simplicity is the source of many of its benefits. Every other VCS out there is more complex.
Pardon me, but 12345 is 3 extra bits.
I don't like the "persistence" of Google either, but... if you want to use their package of services (Plus, GMail, others...) the stakes are just going to get higher and higher.

Today, it's a cell phone number for the "benefit" security. Tomorrow, they will ask for a SSN in order to use Gmail.

They offer free services for one reason, and one reason only... and it isn't because they like giving away stuff.

Google is offering "X" service so they can bargain your data out of you, more and more of your data. That, IMO, is the reality of the situation. I would challenge that most people don't understand fully the bargain they are getting.

Google knows most people don't understand this bargain.

Now, that said, do they offer value in the services they provide in exchange for this data? Sure.

If you want that value, they will either:

1. Get your data, and quit asking for it.

2. Not get your data, but keep asking for it, as many times as they want, because it's their sandbox.

And here's the kicker in my opinion, millions of people are going to keep signing up for and using their free services, and keep offering their data in exchange for using their services.

The Google world just keeps on turning...
> Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone.

For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added you to a circle. This included push notification spam for at least a year – they added a setting after ~6 months but it didn't actually work, requiring the iOS app to be uninstalled to stop it.

> An intern built it? It's one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built.

a) Scrolling the G+ timeline would show this is a very rosy depiction: notice how it's jerky even in Chrome? Hit the spacebar and notice how, unlike almost every other page on the web, you can't scroll? Now try touch scrolling on WebKit and notice that it's being faked in JavaScript, which is why it's incredibly janky.

b) I was specifically referring to the Google+ integration they replaced Reader's social features with: it went from something which provided a simple way to share items, see other public shares and comments on the same item and see what your friends had shared to a simple button which didn't work on mobile devices (the dialog was clipped so none of it was visible) for at least a year and there was no attempt to see other shares of the same item, aggregate the same item being shared by multiple people you follow, or make it possible to see Reader shares separate from, say, status updates by people in your circles.

> And a flamboyant hate for a product they refuse to use no matter what, which is a very carefully designed and free social product.

I tried using it heavily when it first came out. I still use it more than most other people I know but … much as I might have wanted Google to give Facebook competition, they just failed to produce a quality product. I was willing to put up with bugs at launch but when there were basic QA oversights which took a year to fix (i.e. notification spam above) it was really obvious that it's about making something they want to push as a wedge against Facebook rather than something you'd choose to use — when anyone who actually uses it could find basic bugs in a few minutes, so it's unbelievable that nobody at Google noticed or was able to fix them in anything like their normal timeframe.
The UK does have worse obesity problems than the rest of western europe, so parent asks a reasonable question.

Is obesity a factor in greater rates of liver disease?
I think the argument is that no existing client that a user would actually have on their PC supported flags in any meaningful way: they weren't stored efficiently, they weren't presented in a way the user could effectively see, and in many cases they were limited to a random subset of flags (in the case of some clients, like Thunderbird, you could have exactly five flags with the names flag1 through flag5). The support in some clients has become more reasonable, but it is still not really usable. Even at the protocol level it is only recently that there is any effective way where flags could be efficiently resynchronized between the client and the server, and AFAIK there still isn't a standard to let flags have remap able high-level Unicode names. Sure, it would be interesting to push client developers to start maybe considering flags to be an interesting thing to support sufficiently to let a user work with Gmail, but frankly wouldn't we expect Google, as users, to build something actually usable?