skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that it has the feel of paternalism, but I think there's another way to look at it.I think, that all things considered, obamacare makes society as a whole a better place.

Paternalism and consumer protections are two sides of the same coin. The fact is that without some protections, you could wind up signing your life away due to some sleazy fine print.

Dealing with insurance companies is asymmetric warfare. There's an entire industry built around maximizing the profits it makes on customers. The surest way to boost profits is to make people think they're buying more protection than they are. Charge more for less. That's one of the many reasons consumer protections exist.
Public Office Hours with Alexis Ohanian
I don't understand the desire to isolate each wearable in such ways. We have in our pocket a computer which should always have order of magnitudes of processing power and storage, to which other wearables should be able to take advantage of! Think the old days of logging in to your powerful mainframe, but on the body(glasses watches, clothes bluetooth into your pocket computer.) So a lot less needs to be embedded into each, to make it more style worthy(smaller footprint), and feature rich.
They had their lunch eaten by the heartbeaters, and when we were done eating their lunch, we ate them :)
> A mechanic is a specialist.

Yeah, I think I agree with you. But playing devil's advocate, my handyman might be called a "Groundskeeper" or similar if he was full-time and a servant...and to me (who's not handy at all) he's a specialist as well.
That's a miscalculation of opportunity costs. You are throwing away the time you could have spent doing better things than voting. How many times have you cast the deciding vote in an election?
I doubt there ever will be a Year of Smart Watches. They are too small (and too far to eyes) to provide a smart screen.
I doubt that the FBI (or any other US authority) is allowed to operate in any state outside the USA. Similar with all other countries.
Certainly the case. Historically, less the case but still the case...
>They're given fairly little pay, maybe $1200/mo and room and board

While that is a servant, such an employee is a domestic servant who makes a good deal more than the typical fast-food worker, intern, or graduate student. Such a job easily falls within humane labor standards: you're given free lodgings in an expensive area, probably in a nice house, some amount of money on top of that (which, again, goes much further when you've got no rent to pay), and hopefully humane working hours. Plenty of people I know would do this job in preference to their actual jobs.
>Growing up in the U.S., servants have a kind of old-world upper-class, if not crusty and exploitive, vibe.

In parts of Mexico and South America I have seen lavish, large homes built for U.S. retirees, where the real estate agent indicated without shame that certain small and often un-windowed rooms were for live-in help. What would the Americans, who move into these homes, call the people (mostly women) who will inhabit these rooms?
It won't have any effect on the next elections except maybe a few people here and there to be elected to champion for the rights.

The majority of the NSA programs were operated with both Republican and Democratic blessing.
I don't think it is cynicism to expect a business to choose better markets. I do think the whole Streetview thing is forward looking enough that the immediate economics are not the only thing they consider.
I don't get you. Is not C high-level?
33 by the World Bank, 36.8 by the CIA. Using the CIA's numbers rather than the world Bank, India is comparable to New Zealand or Japan. It's still well below the US (45) or the world as a whole (39).

India's problem is poverty, not inequality. Much as first world hipsters try to conflate the two, they are not the same thing.
In his books Taleb is weirdly reluctant to address global warming and climate change, which may be the ultimate nonlinear Black Swan system of our age—prone to sudden shocks that may have catastrophic results. There is a brief mention of the issue on page 415 of Antifragile, but he doesn’t discuss the issue in any detail.

Actually I find Taleb's point about not meddling with complex systems much more persuasive in the AGW debate than the dubious scientific research that gets churned out.
Any solutions available for vim?
'You are calling another human being a "perk"!'

uh, no ... CEOs get assistants as perks (our CEO has three - maybe one is 'necessary' but the others are certainly perks) and no one bats an eye. That's because they're paid a salary and are employed at-will: they can leave whenever they want. It's not "another human being as a perk," it's a position benefiting the CEO that the company is willing to pay for.

About #7: I'm a USian and I'd absolutely have servants if I could afford them. Not slaves, but servants with a paycheck. Why not? I'm happen to "spread the wealth" but I'm not just going to give it away- you need to earn it ... how about keeping my lawn looking nice? Here's your paycheck. Maybe do my laundry? Here's your paycheck. Keep the place tidy, please... and here's your paycheck.
And...you don't need to denormalize your data set if the underlying system is fast enough to deliver timely results. And because it's not denormalized, it's smaller, and you can fit more data...etc etc.

Folks who think they have big data problems really need to define the size of their data set -- not the size of the resulting BigDataDB, or the number of servers they have. The two are not the same.
What are you saying? Just because they could be violent means they are violent?

There's no profession where someone couldn't act violently.
so just deep-clone your object before freezing / sealing, right?
I don't know what's normal to you. It's a backup phone, using a PrePay plan on another network (prepays are pretty cheap in my country) and indeed I'm making less calls with it than with my primary. I'm also keeping it off the data-network, unless I need to connect.

So basically I use it as a dumb phone and it's a pretty good dumb phone.
Learning Lagrangian mechanics was like falling in love all over again with your girlfriend when you discovered exactly how elegant she could be. Easily my favorite part of classical mechanics as an undergrad.
Solar energy facts
"and poorer access to treatment"

One critical thing about what I gather is the vast majority of plans is that their provider networks are narrow since the insurance companies were pressured hard to lower costs (we've all read about how many quality hospitals have been outright excluded). So narrow that routine medicine outside of your county or local area is out-of-network and entirely uncovered.

This is going to have some serious effects on those who've retired but have not yet reached the 65 year old threshold for Medicare and have a second home, e.g. snowbirds who want to avoid harsh northern winters: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/more_obamacare_devast...
He's just observing the putative pros/cons of having a society ran by a hereditary elite, versus by the spazzes that got all the best grades in school. He doesn't clearly prefer one over the other, but laments the erosion of the good parts of the old regime.
But (at least as I understand it) they were being sold out of Germany, and not by either the UK or US.
Income taxes, enforced. India has plenty of money and resources, and would have more of both after adopting a minimum wage because labor would be better utilized. It might be hard but don't tell me it can't happen or that people will starve to death.
I'd get a cheap short term policy to cover you for major accidents or sudden illness, then move states and enter ACA if necessary (i.e. if you have discovered a serious medical condition).
This Week in the Business: $200 Million Pledged for Kickstarter Games
artisans as a group are never going to be as important as they were in, say, 1700

Neither Taleb nor Seliger (the reviewer) lists software developers as among the artisans, but I think they should. Doing so makes the quoted claim wildly false.
Sounds like you should run a VPN server somewhere you can tunnel through when Christmas shopping.
What would look like to a social network?
I'm getting the following when running "vagrant up"; this is on Debian.

$ vagrant up
/home/chrishaskell/src/vector/Vagrantfile:7:in `<top (required)>': undefined method `configure' for Vagrant:Module (NoMethodError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:115:in `load'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:115:in `block in procs_for_source'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config.rb:41:in `block in capture_configures'
from <internal:prelude>:10:in `synchronize'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config.rb:36:in `capture_configures'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:114:in `procs_for_source'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:51:in `block in set'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:45:in `each'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:45:in `set'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:377:in `block in load_config!'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:392:in `call'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:392:in `load_config!'
from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:327:in `load!'
from /usr/bin/vagrant:40:in `<main>'

If you post the generated C code then I'll give the timings and try to compare what it's doing differently.

The CPU I'm using (Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz) was released in July 2006 [1]. The GPU you're using was released on 15 June 2007 [2]. My CPU code calculates the 1246x998 pixel image of the zoomed out view (real=-2..2, imag=-1.6..1.6, maxdepth=200) in 0.07 seconds, if your GPU code does about the same in 0.61 sec, then that's about 8 times slower than the slightly older CPU can do with hand optimized C code. That wouldn't be such a pretty result yet :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series
ITunes Connect is unavailable until December 28.
Permission checks are done when you open[1] a file, not when you otherwise operate on it. So yes, you could access "unauthorized" files. It's up to the sending process whether it wants to share particular filedescriptor to someone else, so you can't gain access to something you're not supposed to though.

[1] I'm not sure about security frameworks, it may be e.g. SELinux provides more granular checks.
Looking at stuff my friends share, sharing stuff myself and engaging in banter in the comment thread on those items. No, it's generally not the stuff of the court of Sokrates, but definitely fun.
Google is an American company in an area that desperately needs the tax revenue. Even the money they "earn in the US" is washed through subsidiaries overseas.
My thinking on it is that they'll become popular fast because as we become more connected to our phones, smart watches are a much less obtrusive and disrupting way to look at notifications. Basically, you can add a screening device onto your wrist that you can use when you're in meetings, driving, walking down the street, to quickly decide if it's worth pulling out your phone without making it obvious you're pulling out your phone.
"Preventive care should not be something you look to insurance to pay for. Do you expect to be insured against your weekly grocery shopping bill? Your utilities? Your rent?"

In fact, Obamacare mandates that much preventive care be provided for free. Health insurance is different from many kinds of insurance, which you hope never to collect on. With healthcare insurance you're very likely to use at least some covered services every year. Preventive care is the kind of care everyone should have every year, and it is the kind of care that best reduces health costs, making it best for patients and for nation as a whole. That's why Obamacare requires that it be covered 100%, even in least expensive bronze plans. This encourages people to get preventive care and prevents bigger expenses for them later on. I'm not knocking Obamacare. Hardly, I'm a proponent of it. It makes sense.
The q woudl be how fast our are competitors? searching a huge document store for a given id say scale out using something like hadoop.
It's only "earned overseas" because Google pays foreign subsidiaries money from its US operating company. Its a dodge and everyone knows it.
> We still call all those people service providers.

Well, I'm wondering if we're using "service providers" as a euphemism for certain classes of servants because we're uncomfortable with the word. I've never actually heard anybody in the U.S. say they have "servants", despite having a Au Pairs, Personal Assistants, Live-in gardeners etc.

At what point does my maid, who I personally contract with become a servant rather than a service provider? Does she have to come every day? Do I have to be her only employer? Can she just come once a week?

I think in reality what Americans are afraid of is not "servants" per se, but "servitude" and all that implies.
This is old news, but: smart glasses solve the problem of making something smaller and more convenient, without the problem of a too-small screen.

While google glass does look stupid, it's not hard to make cool-looking sunglasses.

Privacy concerns will delay adoption, but unfortunately we've already lost privacy. It will just take a while for us to accept it - though I doubt we will by 2014.
Do keep in mind that those were never written down as rules to be followed, but postulated in a work that criticized such social norms.
Well, I don't really want to claim on my car insurance either, but it would be pretty unusual if the insurance company covered my MOT.

What sort of insurance are you thinking of that you do plan to collect on?
> The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy?

Being vague is sorta almost as fun as doing this other thing.

I think social criticism today relies too much on arguments made between lines to be effective.
Great examples for 'Bad Design'
There's also a lot of allied stuff, e.g. the stimulus bill is requiring doctors to move to electronic record keeping. And it has two crucial words, they must make "meaningful use" of the systems. According to a friend in the field, those two words blossomed into about 700 pages of regulations, and small fortunes are being made by consultants who give advice on this.

And I'd read of abd implementation where as the doctor fills in more info, more lights on the UI turn green. That one quit, judging the government was inserting itself a little too strongly in the doctor-patient relationship.
If this is BS, then that relieves me. This is what a trustworthy acquaintance who is an engineer at Facebook told me. As onedev said below, all access is logged and changes can be rolled back. Engineers use live user data for their local development and testing. But maybe this level of access is limited to certain feature teams.
While your other points are all valid, certificates can be bought on the cheap, at least for side projects: $8/y from Comodo, $9.5/y from GeoTrust.
How do Susskind’s lectures compare to Walter Lewin’s lectures?
In case you're interested in what it looks like WITH org-mode:

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

This is a great tutorial on an end-to-end org-mode setup, with very in-depth time tracking. Note that most people don't go to quite this length, but it's nice when someone does and documents it.
Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing
Overstock.com plans to accept bitcoin in 2014
Did anyone do the math here? If a family making 100K pays 12K for insurance, and a family making 94K pays 6K for insurance, that is the exact same amount at the end of the year. Wonder how long they had to search to find this clean of an example. Seems the best solution for the family is to either ask for a raise (all take home profit) or take a sabbatical every year (more time to enjoy life).
So his point is that databases are going to go away (odd, considering even Google went back to a nice ACIDy RDBMS for AdWords), and Microsoft is just going to ignore any sort of scaling technology and disappear. That's certainly an odd perspective.

MS has two problems with "big data" (and let's just pretend lots of people have big data problems - I've seen people deploy 100-node Hadoop clusters to deal with 30M rows/month of data because they think Hadoop is some magic sauce.)

First, they want to squeeze as much money out of enterprise customers as possible. Look at the new SQL Server pricing and limitations, where the SQL team is doing things they promised they wouldn't and previously mocked Oracle for doing (charging by core). Their in-memory solution (Hekaton) comes a bit late, and only for Enterprise edition.

Second, they generally want to deliver solutions that the majority of their customers can figure out. Again, look at Hekaton. From what I've read, it'll have extremely high compatibility with T-SQL. Shipping a limited release that only had a small subset of SQL, even though it'd be useful for certain apps, probably was never a serious consideration. Hell, look at C# and how their customers are begging them to please not innovate too much, since learning is hard.

There's also the Azure push. SQL Azure has federations, making it easy to shard a traditional SQL schema across many physical instances. They also promote Hadoop on Azure. (As I understand, Hadoop's a dead-end; even inside Google, MapReduce was toasted by Dremel, right?)

If Microsoft just added Hadoop-style functionality to one of their server products, it would not be friendly. People capable of writing an OK SQL query for a report can't necessarily format that same query in an efficient map-reduce style.

And really, since this need is far less than it's played out to be, MS is probably just fine pushing and profiting off their traditional solutions. Azure helps them secure a few leading-edge needs, and eventually they'll roll out an easy-to-use commercial solution.
> Digital Ocean, for example, won't give you more than 1 IPv4 address per VPS, which means you need a separate VPS for every side project, if you want to go HTTPS.

As long as you're not supporting clients running IE on WinXP or other similarly old web browsers, Server Name Indication (where the hostname is included as a part of the handshake) will work and it'll eliminate your need for more than one IP.
Its fascinating how British decryption of French diplomatic cables, which gave them deep insight into de Gaulle's position on Britain's entry to the Common Market, didn't give them a way to stop him then either. (Source: Spycatcher by Wright)

Reading the mail of those you negotiate with doesn't always give you a sure bet.
Sounds like you're extending intent of quote to be about "pre-existing conditions". Obamacare requires that health insurance policies cover pre-existing conditions, which is another difference from other types of insurance. The only way this could reasonably be required would be if all individuals are required to always carry insurance, which is what gives rise to the much-debated "individual mandate". All of this makes good sense, in my mind.

You don't say why you were denied coverage for broken leg rehab and pneumonia treatment. It seems a stretch for it to have been denied as pre-existing condition, but one of the problems when insurance companies were allowed to deny for pre-existing conditions was that they did often make non-sensical stretches to deny. I think reason for denial in your case was probably for something else, perhaps something like an insurer's "annual cap" on coverage (but not that b/c your previous coverage was years earlier), another thing that now is gone thanks to Obamacare.
You don't need a unique IP per domain for SSL. I've got multiple $10/yr certs via Gandi for domains and I can put several on one DO VPS if I like. Tested and working, I have had no trouble at least with a basic SSL cert.
That's a great summary.
I absolutely agree. I hit the first chapter of SICM like a brick wall on my first attempt, but after watching Susskind's lectures I found it far easier to understand (although it is still a very difficult book!)

http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/classical-mechanics/20...
Read the footnote. Copied here:

"The British government insisted upon this silence because it has given the thousands of Enigma machines that it had gathered up after the end of the war to its former colonies as they gained independence and needed secure systems of communication." p 979 The Codebreakers by David Kahn ↩
They don't even seem that strange as an American. It's just (a parody of) typical conservative Protestant small-town mentality. Much of Scandinavia at the time was made up of religious, Protestant small towns, with most of the population engaged in farming or fishing (and the novel in question was set in such a town). People in small-town and rural America don't like big-city, degree-and-money-having people who "think they're better", either. Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street, about small-town American attitudes, has some loose parallels.

I think the same is true even today in the US. Some of the people who're lionized in Palo Alto or NYC would be shunned in much of the "heartland", if they flaunted their wealth or education and came across as thinking they were a "super-achiever". You're allowed to be rich, but you're expected to act somewhat humble and "down-to-earth" about it and not see yourself as better than other kinds of people (especially farmers, who have their own mythos). Warren Buffet, a lifelong midwesterner, is an example of being rich but still sort of pulling that off.
You are right. Step 1, fix the woefully broken legal system in India. Step 2, streamline the crippling and impossible to navigate bureaucracy. Step 3, create a functional income tax collection apparatus in a mostly cash society. Step 4, solve the drinking water and sewage problems. Step 5, convince the majority of the country inhabitants that the cast system is bad (they do not think so). ... Step X, implement an Cross the board minimum wage.
"Preventive care is the kind of care everyone should have every year, and it is the kind of care that best reduces health costs...."

BZZZT.

As I understand it, study after study shows preventive case does not result in cost reductions. E.g. look at the controversial mammogram screening recommendations that came out a while ago. There are many other mechanisms where not immediately obvious things come into play.

That's not to say we shouldn't do it, look at the backlash to those mammogram recommendations, which would have killed a friend of mine in her early 40s if she and her doctor had followed them, just that they will overall cost more.