skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I am aware, we do not ration health care in Canada

I was feeling weird about a year ago, visited my doctor, and requested a metabolic panel and some blood sugar tests. A few weeks later, and about $10 out of pocket, I had my test results. (I paid about $200/m for health insurance at the time)

My Canadian friends tell me this isn't possible in Canada. The doctor simply won't order the tests for you because tests are expensive.

I'm curious as to whether this is widespread. If so, the Canadian health care system seems like the opposite of the American health care system. In the USA drugs are expensive but your insurance will pay for any sort of test. Indeed, doctors will over test you, or comply with any patient test request because insurance will readily reimburse them.

From what I know about Canadian health care, drugs are cheap, but doctors are discouraged from doing tests due to the cost. I'm curious as to whether this is an accurate assessment of the Canadian system...
Top 20 Hottest Hollywood Actress Pictures
I don't remember anyone arguing that a popping Web 2.0 bubble would cause a recession, or even lead to a measurable change in GDP. In fact, GDP might have been higher without that bubble -- more people buying drinks at bars instead of poking on Facebook, or buying CDs rather than listening to Last.fm.
I couldn't disagree more with this. Scripting is in many ways "glue" that ties to programs together. It's not perfect and it may not even be really necessary if the programs were designed to be extensible in the first place.

As soon as you go beyond "glue," you run straight into this http://www.xkcd.com/568/ (second panel). No matter how high level your programming language, it doesn't read minds. When we write programs we trivially understand that a program is a precise description of what needs to be done. Sure we have more advanced primitives for doing stuff nowadays, but we still need to say exactly what we want. Remember, if your programming language is ambiguous, that's a flaw. I believe there always will be a clear distinction among programmers and non-programmers, as I don't believe that this will ever change. 90% of people want to say "make a cool game" and have it happen, regardless of whether or not that actually works.
Hello, I recomend you Pagefour.

http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html

Is a word processor design to help writers.
So the brain is, in a way, executing before the data is available (energy in this case).

You can absorb drugs on your mouth:
http://silversol.110mb.com/use/sublin.htm

I would think that carbs are also readily absorbed in some quantity without the need of ingesting them.
Give people a reason to need to call you.
Rock Band game platform opens to indie music
THC does not make you a better programmer, though I suppose there could be some Balmer-peak like point of intoxication out there. I did once have an interesting insight into the my mind on drugs, though, in writing a simple TI-83+ program for use in a rangefinder my friends and I decided to build while high. The final product worked exactly correctly, but when I examined the code in a non-intoxicated state, I saw that I had used some fairly elaborate trig identities, when the most appropriate solution would have simply been the tangent.
That said, cannabis does tend to get me doing something right away, even if I dispense with the original work half the time. The sense of pure fascination is sometimes of great value.

Now the real question is whether LSD improves my math skills.
Also: Short feedback cycles are good.
I remember we had the square problem as homework in 5th grade.

The triangle problem is more difficult, since parity matters (I think.) But I did come up with a solution which seems correct.
Not at all. I may note that our dream of parallelization (us systems people trying to implement it and the language designers trying to write it) is not easier or trivial multithreaded authoring, but implicit parallelization. Wouldn't it be unbelievably cool to just write your program and have it parallelized by the language semantics themselves? :) Come, join the dark side and take control of more power than you can possibly imagine! Muahahaha
Please provide ashtrays and convenient places to dispose of them. We'll use them when they are available.
1984 was certainly "shock" at the time it was written. Since then many of the concepts have simply become so commonplace as to be unremarkable.

And I'm certainly not claiming that this is great literature, merely providing counterexamples to the idea that "shock is cheap".
* "...42% of Canadians with colon cancer die while 31% of Americans, (..), survive the disease*

Wait, what? 42% of Canadians die, ok that kinda sucks if you have colon cancer. 31% of Americans survive implies to me that 69% ...don't. 69% chance of death vs 42% change of death...I'll take the 42% please.

I presume this is a case of sloppy blogging rather than deliberate manipulation, but this kind of nonsense does a disservice to the complexities of the healthcare and ageing debates. I would refer people to the Economist's extensive and sober-minded coverage of these complex issues - which has also been the subject of controversy and in fact makes profoundly depressing reading, but is a deal more informative.

BTW, as a European who has benefited extensively from the Euro model of healthcare growing up, it is more impersonal and less reassuring than my experience of American healthcare. But it's there for you most of the time, and you won't be forced into bankrupcty.
I don't want to start a deep thread on this, but I do want to point out that one of the advantages of a free market is that you only have to make these choices for yourself, not for others.

You can select an insurance policy with rationing and a $10M lifetime benefit, and I can select an insurance policy without rationing but with a flat $1M lifetime benefit. The system we have now is not free because governments dictate what kind of policies medical insurers can offer, preventing consumers from making many of these types of choices.

When we decide that one size fits all, then the only choice is to have politicians and bureaucrats making these decisions for everyone.

When you make a decision about what your life is worth, that seems morally sane. When someone else makes a decision about how much your life is worth, that seems morally objectionable. Only free markets allow us to mostly avoid the latter choice.
I like to use a ShopSafe solution from BoA/Mastercard that lets me generate a different card and limit for every purchase I make online. However, I use PayPal 90% of the time.
I don't think there's anything uniquely American about it. It's the same - usually worse - pretty much everywhere. The sad part is that it seems that the Web, once seen as hope for improvement, is actually making it worse.
I expected better from the WSJ. Even if what the author says is true, he supports his assertion with blanket statements and anecdotes.
It's true that you are right now subsidizing others health care and someone else will subsidize you when you're sick from something you didn't expect to get.
Is that really a hard restriction? Curious whether anyone has tried to do it more than once. I needed to do it for only a few songs because my backups were corrupt (or incomplete) when a drive died.
Calling the current US system "private healthcare" without thinking of the idealized private healthcare is a fallacy.

Let's suppose drugs and medical procedures were not subsidized by any body. (Completely impractical (not a recommendation) but useful for this thought experiment.) What do you think would happen to the price of these drugs and medical procedures. People would pay for them if they valued them at their price.

In having people pool together money in an insurance body (of which there are currently many) you allow shared responsibility so that a disaster (theoretically) does not financially destroy someone. So now drug companies et al are indeed negotiating with insurance companies. Insurance companies have huge margins (nature of the business) and end up paying prices based on the value after margin. Because of this padding, prices go up.

Now imagine instead of a bunch of insurance companies you have one. This is public healthcare. Prices will be very high, but it won't look like that to the consumer because it is a public cost.

Furthermore the "ask Canada" argument from the privatize-it side points out the reduced wait-times and increased specialized innovation that occurs in America.

No one's arguing that the way it is now is perfect, but a public system in America is a scary thought.
Aren't Django signals a little like COMEFROM?
Ruby 1.9 is great, we need to get support from existing gems to make the Rails people switch. A lot of stuff doesn't work with 1.9.
I bought a desktop because of the traditional powerhouse machine vs. meek laptop image among developers, but I regret it now. I've since sold it, and gotten a powerful laptop with external monitors. So much more flexible this way.
Not gonna happen. Sorry, but this is like saying that we need a breakthrough in "base 3" because "base 2" is too limiting. The fundamental physics of our computing is unlikely to change (I'm sorry but I don't see quantum computing being practical in the next 50 years, if ever), therefore eventually we'll still be programming opcodes on processor dies. However, if you don't believe that the underlying architecture of computing hasn't changed in, hell, the past ten years, then I think you've been programming in high level languages a bit too much.
I haven't owned a desktop machine in 8 years. And I wouldn't touch a machine that isn't a Thinkpad.
The Internet used to be mostly filled with intellectuals and I thought people here were much smarter than the general population I encountered. Today the net is a cesspool.
Interesting. I had recently been thinking about if it would possible to hack original songs into Rock Band/Guitar Hero. I guess this will enable it to happen officially for Rock Band at least (with required approval...).

http://creators.rockband.com/

It is already possible in Frets on Fire or course:

http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/
I must have met or corresponded with 50+ people off of HN.
Correct. Which is why we shouldn't be asking, "How much is this pill worth and is a human life for x time units worth that much?" and instead ask, "How much will it cost to try and develop x medical treatment and is the societal benefit worth that cost?" Given that a number of the most well known drugs today were developed by universities funded by government grants, this may be more topical than first believed.

Honestly, I think that capitalism works for a lot of things -- health care not being one of them. I think the idea of a "profit margin" on health care is prima facie ridiculous.
Driven to Distraction - Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit
The first problem is that the government would be even more horrible at choosing among startups than they are at choosing among big corporations with several past bids under their belt. The second problem is that startups are generally a perfect storm of failure when it comes to navigating the intricate hurdles of securing government contracts.
To be clear, we just went through a Panic. This is what happens.

We recovered from the Panic and now we are going through a Recession. There's no collapse as far as I can see but like any panic, it sure felt like we were close to a collapse.

State governments were completely unable to cope with the sudden, significant decrease in funds: California and NY are in big trouble.

But it's not a collapse. People should start reading about the other major panics that the US experienced instead of just reacting to the current one. Turns out it's not as bad as what we went through before. But it is bad.

The Housing Bubble will unfortunately go down in history with Tulipmania, the South Sea Bubble, and the the Great Panic of 1873. We'll recover but unfortunately, it's going to be slow treading and state services will be cut significantly even while federal services will likely expand.
Have had the same experience with multi touch interfaces and my kids: they instantly get it. They drag things around, stretch, move etc... all without being told.

Will be interesting to see what the future holds - perhaps the idea of a separate mouse to a screen will be seen as quaint one day.

The funny thing is the mouse should be a a very basic instrument - its basically point and grunt. But the dexterity required for kids is a bit of a step - touch seems to make it even more intuitive.
What makes you think they'll want to? :)
Why did you expect better from WSJ? Most of the time they are horrible.
Video: teaching robots to drive with evolved robotic controllers
And the implication here is that the other industrialized nations are free-riders on development costs paid by the Americans and would probably need to pay more in their markets.

Has anybody seen any research on how much of the difference between health care costs in the US and Canada/Europe are accounted for by the difference in drug prices?

I also expect that international cooperation on the approval process for new drugs might reduce development costs. Perhaps the UN might actually make itself useful and form something like an international version of the FDA and have member nations agree to abide by its decisions.
That is actually possible too, since Sprint's market cap is only $12.8b, and Apple's is $135b. A deal that is part cash, mostly Apple stock would probably go down well with current Sprint shareholders (the ones I know are fairly pessimistic about Sprint's future, but are holding in the hopes that the Pre helps, or it gets acquired for a premium).

Sprint definitely has a history of horrible customer service, which maybe Apple could finally slay. I live in their home market (KC), so obviously coverage is great here, but not sure if it would be sufficient nationwide to be worth it to Apple. That said, Amazon apparently thinks coverage is sufficient for the Kindle.

Definitely an interesting idea... who knows if Apple really wants to bother running the network though. It could take a while to raise network and customer service quality to meet Apple-customer expectations (ie. perfection), tarnishing Apple's hard-earned brand name along the way. Claiming all the successes (the device) and blaming all the problems (the network) on AT&T could be convenient.
Here's my rule: If a feed emits more than about 5 items per day, it's probably a shitty feed. And more importantly, that anything that is actually interesting on them will be repeated here, on Hacker News, or on Digg, or reddit, or on one of the feeds that I do follow.

I largely use my feed reader to make sure I don't miss stuff from the sites that publish much more irregularly (and so that I don't have to periodically check them).
The drug companies spend vastly more money on marketing than they do on research, and furthermore, the vast majority of the research goes into treatments rather than cures, because the former makes money and the latter does not.

The world would be better off without American drug companies dominating the market, even if it meant no Viagra.
They didn't have Google in the 1930s.
Two things to be said about this argument.

One: Martha Angell says it's just a line of propaganda. From a review at http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp/...

"In The Truth About the Drug Companies, [former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine] Angell explains how a huge portion of the revenue generated by 'Big Pharma' goes not into research and development but into aggressive marketing campaigns to sell their product. She describes how, even though the drug companies claim that it costs them an average of 802 million dollars per drug to develop new medicines, that figure is obscenely inflated since it factors in marketing as well as expected interest the company would have received had they invested the money in the open market. Meanwhile, Angell says, most of the R & D work is done by colleges and universities funded by the government. There are also problems with the drugs themselves, Angell indicates, since a majority are 'me-too drugs', slightly modified versions of existing products which meant to address concerns of consumers most likely to spend money on pharmaceuticals..."

Two: Even if I were to accept the argument at face value -- which I do not -- what it's saying is that as an American I pay far and away the highest medical costs in the developed world, yet receive no better health outcome, and have no guarantee that my insurance will actually cover me when I get sick (rather than finding a way to reject me based on some technicality)... all in order to generously subsidize drug research for the benefit of the rest of the world. Now, I like to think of myself as a generous guy, and I used to work in drug research... but screw that. I'll take Canadian or Western-European-style healthcare, peace of mind, and a check. Then we can talk about how much of my extra money I'd like to contribute to erectile-dysfunction research.
Apple would enjoy many benefits from buying a telecom company, but there's one factor that would almost certainly prevent it: anything bad the telecom did would then be blamed by the public (even if completely irrationally) on Apple. Apple makes most of their money from being the "sexy consumer electronics company", and no matter how you try to spin a telecom, you can't make it sexy. The only way Apple could successfully buy out a telecom would involve replacing the entire culture of the telecom with Apple's own dedication-to-snobby-perfection culture, which itself would involve replacing most of the employees and management with Apple's own. They'd have no one left to make computers!
While Apple has the iPhone, they're not a telecom company. Few companies do well when they start to stray outside of their core competencies. Think Time Warner.
Slight correction: the government admits that SpaceX can do it better and cheaper if they can deliver on their predictions. NASA is paying for a series of test flights to determine whether or not that's actually the case.

Remember, the Falcon 9 hasn't actually launched yet (although much of the design is shared with the Falcon 1). I'm really looking forward to its first test launch, which should be coming up before just too long. Their ground crew overhead is impressively low.
You and the other couple of dozen guys writing in Coq
It's so beautiful.
It's not about me subsidizing others, I understand how insurance works it's about disproportionate risk. There isn't an emphasis on creating change in society to encourage people to live lifestyles that needlessly expose them to risk, and burden our health system.

It's unacceptable to not give people treatment for acute problems. However no-one is talking about how a lot of those acute problems are made much more likely by some lifestyles than others.

If you buy car insurance you pay more or less based on your risk factors such as age, experience, points on your license, etc. If people choose to increase their risk for health issues than it seems unreasonable that the rest of us should have to pay for their lifestyle choices.

It also seems like any healthcare reform should attempt to encourage people to reduce unnecessary burden on the system. That might make it more possible to increase the amount available to spend treatments for people with terminal illness, because less our of GDP would be spent on treating unnecessary chronic or acute illnesses.
Making sense of the '1984' Kindle kerfuffle
Introduction to non-blocking I/O
They'll have no choice but to. Do you have that choice today?
I have both ... just keep the laptop off your lap and get a desk -- laptops are horrible ergonomically.
That's an awfully broad statement, don't you think? The Internet used to be an area with a higher-than-normal density of intellectuals, and now you can only say that about some parts of the Internet. But please don't lump it all together as if there was some sort of equivalence between (say) Hacker News and 4chan and Christian Youth Forums and YouTube and the Energy from Thorium forum.

If the net is a cesspool, then so is the entire world.
Some problems with his argument: Time Warner may own AOL, but it also costs them heavily. Most of their network is Roadrunner/Earthlink before AOL as an ISP.

Microsoft is spending tons of money on online marketing to ensure that they're not a moot point. They are trying to make "Bing" valuable and thus their ad market valuable.

Myspace was pretty much doomed from the start. The underlying software was pretty shitty.

Cisco - what? +/- 10% is STEADY in this market. The market crashed and cisco went down. Duh?
I thought that after a bunch of stuff about investing in boring, conservative investments, the last line was hilarious:

"Next article: my favorite biotech plays."
GCC's code isn't incorrect. As per the C standard, after you've dereferenced a NULL pointer then all behavior is undefined. If GCC emitted code that launched ICBMs after a NULL pointer dereference, that wouldn't violate the spec either.

The real WTF here is that people are still building "secure" software in a language where programmer mistakes cause undefined behavior...
If the national health plan is inadequate for the rich, a private system will continue to cater to them. The point of the national plan is to raise the floor.
To paraphrase Clayton Christensen's "The law of conservation of attractive profits":

"When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage. That is, the location in the value chain where attractive profits can be earned shifts in a predictable way over time."

Companies make attractive money when they solve the hardest problems.

Read his book, "Seeing What's Next"

Also: http://eser.org/oil-and-gas/The_law_of_conservation_of_attra...

Just because it's true that many internet businesses have become modular, commoditized, and marginally profitable, does not mean that there is a shortage of difficult and highly valuable problems to solve.

The companies the author listed are "component manufacturers". Future profits will be created by combining those components in creative ways to solve new problems.

Quoting Economist Paul Romer: “Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable."
see: http://eser.org/oil-and-gas/Eser_Corporation%27s_Business_Ph...
Short doc on video games and broken consoles
Okay, you're right. I amend my statement to read that people who support drug criminalization are either horrible human beings, or stupid human beings who haven't spent much time thinking about who their righteous opinions might hurt in real life, and who as voters are directly partially responsible for the said pain. Is that an excuse? I suppose it's better than causing the pain on purpose.
Angling for the perfect five-second sound bite makes all debate more inane, but the debate about copyright is a particularly awful case: most of those TV cameras are owned by major media companies that have an axe to grind.

It's not a coincidence that the media industries have a degree of political influence that's out of proportion to their size. If you're a politician, it's good to avoid irritating major media corporations, and it's even better to have them on your side.

This is why Larry Lessig eventually gave up on trying to make his arguments more eloquent and went into the corruption-fighting business. Eloquence is great, but it doesn't do much good when the fix is in.
Moof is Live