skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that even most private healthcare advocates suggest that we do need to ensure that those who need the care get it - and one way to do so is for governments to cover premiums in order to do it.

Is anybody talking about a plan like that? I haven't heard anything about it, and I would think the GOP would be touting it if thats what they wanted. Most republicans I've heard either seem to be for inaction or for a health care bill that doesn't do anything for the uninsured/needy
I don't think it's unavoidable, but centralization will tend to have these sorts of effects without other controls and institutional checks, yes.

One could imagine a benevolant, meritocratic oligarchy, in which the hiring and promotion process had a strong process of only advancing those up the chain who had demonstrated a certain level of competence, e.g., many successful large engineering organizations.
The US Department of Justice has puts out reports on recidivism rates. Some information from the last report:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rpr94.htm

Those most likely to be rearrested within 3 years of release from prison committed these crimes: robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), and motor vehicle thieves (78.8%).

Those least likely to be rearrested within 3 years committed these crimes: homicide (40.7%), rapists (46.0%), other sexual assaulters (41.4%), other violent offenders (51.7%).

If you look at the sex offender recidivism report, you find that 5.3% of sex offenders are rearrested for another sex crime:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rsorp94.htm
I'd say six months at most. It does mean browser detection - serve TTF to Firefox/Webkit/Opera, OTF to IE - but Typekit, Kernest and Typotheque are all either in the market or in beta with combo javascript/CDN services to handle serving the fonts.
I built a fair sized (5m, 16') windmill and this was one of the most surprising things I learned while designing the blades.

Windmill blades and airplane wings have a lot in common.

I wrote some python software for it to model the curvature and get an idea of how to get the maximum effect out of a blade cut from a given blank.

The neat thing was that without the software being interactive we'd have never clued in to some of the possibilities.

In case anybody is interested here is a snapshot of the python program:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/windmill/snapshot3.p...
Well then they're wrong, because government run systems work better in Western Europe and Canada than the US private system.
RightJS v1.3.0 was just released
A bit off topic, but could someone recommend any good articles or case studies highlighting the importance of site design and the potential affect on sales of nuanced site changes (ie: I recall reading an article about how a small change to a checkout process increased sales x%, but can't find that article).

I am trying to put together some reading material for a non-technical person in my startup who is unconcerned that our web design company is botching things.

(Even if you don't have a specific link, if you remember reading something and can remember the company name or an googleable information, it would be much appreciated).
Define "work better" please
You make a great point about how to intuitively calculate the value of a website.

(Although I should say that I believe the sudden disappearance of facebook would be a pretty big deal, just not along the same lines as the disappearance of google would be.)
I will when the OP defines "worse".
There's a reason "to google" has become a verb.
Is it just me? Or did we all suddenly become 3-year-olds?
I don't deny that they have the majority of the market share, but somehow "disruptive" means something else to me. I haven't looked up the proper definition, though.
As many things in life, often it's not what you know but who you know.

And I guess that if you know the big cheese, it's easier to get all the permits, gov. contracts and financing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erdEZvOq6wo (Several examples where a single call to action was changed trivially, resulting in millions.)

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/developing-shopping... (Rather less impressive ;) )

http://blog.pokercopilot.com/2008/10/do-big-shiny-download-b... (Answer: yes.)
There is no 'true worth'. The value of an employee is what is paid on the market.

Since the relationship is asymetric, with the employer knowing more, being more capable of negotiating, and probably more savvy and intelligent, it is likely that the employees are paid less than what they could negotiate if they were more savvy, smart, or powerful. Therefore, raising their pay via statute, so long as it is still less than the utility gained by the employer by having them around, won't cause anyone to lose a job. There is very likely a gap in the pay the employees collect, and what they could collect if they were more savvy, or had better negotiating skills, or had access to the labor market data the employer has better access to. In those cases where the new minimum wage falls within this gap you have no reason to suspect any loss of jobs.

However, such arguments are totally unnecessary, as we have been running a huge experiment for 60 years and can appeal to empirical data. We do have a minimum wage, and you will not be able to find anyone cannot find a job that is not suffering from psychiatric illness or a substance abuser. Temporary unemployment during economic downswings doesn't count, obviously.
Ability to switch Terminal tabs with Cmd+1, Cmd+2 ...
http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/che.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/Hc09_Be...

I should add as well that just because we're spending more on healthcare doesn't mean that it's getting more expensive. We may just be consuming more and better care. Here's a case for that argument:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/07/keeping-animial-spiri...
Get the two Souders (creator of YSlow, now works on web performance at Google) books, which are amazing. I'm not affiliated with Amazon.com, O'Reilly or Yahoo!; just like Patrick says, these guys know their shit:

High Performance Web Sites (O'Reilly, Sept. 2007): http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...

Even Faster Web Sites (O'Reilly, June 2009): http://www.amazon.com/Even-Faster-Web-Sites-Performance/dp/0...

Half of King's 'Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets' (O'Reilly, July 2008) is devoted to performance, so it's also worth a look: http://www.amazon.com/Website-Optimization-Search-Conversion...
4.3 Inch TFT HD 16000k Color LCD Full Screen 4GB MP5 Player
Eh, I had one of these, it was an Amstrad CPC 464 with a broken tape drive. If I wanted to do anything on it, I had to program it.

But I'm not sure I would have turned out differently had I had a more capable machine (I might even have been able to skip Basic to begin with), and I'm also fairly certain most other kids in the same situation would just give up.
That's as far from the central limit theorem as you can go..
"they don't like resting on their laurels"

You mean like IE6? They actually dismantled that team and didn't do anything till competition heated up many years later.
I don't see anything different in this respect in China than I do in many western societies. Having a leg up is definitely a pre, anywhere. It may differ in degree but certainly not in principle.
OT: Your article was damn good. Have you written any others (going up to /articles didn't work)?
Excuse me?

None of the browsers except IE (and safari?) even has a stable version out that supports @font-face. It's indeed possible that within 6 months all browsers will support @font-face in their latest release version, but that's still a far cry from being able to use it in a meaningful way.

If you care enough about typography to consider custom fonts then you're probably not very keen on having most of your visitors fall back to their platform default. And that will be the case for, at the very least, another year, until those browser upgrades have propagated somewhat.

Then there's the whole issue of bugs and browser incompatibilites. Font rendering is not exactly trivial. And again, if you care about your fonts then you're probably not very happy when each browser renders them "slightly differently".
"Overall. Microsoft is not evil..."

Fined $2 billion dollars on two continents for illegal anti-trust activities, much of those fines occured because Microsoft ignored the agencies they were settling with. Bill Gates claimed (paraphrasing) they were too big to be bothered with all that. (Wish I kept the link.)
Hah! I upmodded because you made a thoughtful comment, but all the thoughts are kindof wrong.

As for your first point, employers might cut back on luxury consumption, and therefore totally offset the increase in costs. I'm with you there, but I doubt it is a major effect.

Private security firms do not enforce law and order. "Whoever is strongest" is the exact opposite of law. They enforce order, but only in so far as it makes them more money to do so, or benefits those who set the policy of the firm. When one security firm attacks another, that is not law and order. All this is is the current system, but where you shrink the countries down to the size of counties, and make all the new tiny countries dictatorships. In other words, this is Europe circa 900AD.

Have you heard of the crusades, inquisition, witch trials? It was taking away civil authority that finally prevented pious monsters from violently enforcing their whims. You could give months of fulltime proof that what you said is nonsense. In fact, they do it all the time, it's called European History.
That's because its harder to bribe people in China compared to the USA. There you need to do a shady deal and pay a ton of money, so family gets the inside track.

In the USA, all it takes is a 100K at election time, and its completely legal.
Sure, but I don´t want to scatter all the SQL clauses over the code. Also, what would happen when you want to modify the way the data is accessed? I.e, you want a write-through cache in front the DB?

I can agree with you if we talk about generic frameworks. I would not take none of them for a big site, or at least I would not take it as is. But I would definetivelty use a framework, either a completely custom one or a modified one.
>> "That's like saying you shouldn't buy a lottery ticket because its unlikely you are going to win."

Yes, which is why lottery tickets are largely just an unfair tax on the poor and uneducated.

I don't play the lottery for similar reasons I don't bother finding out the personal criminal history of everyone living in my town - waste of time. YMMV
In which western countries are 90% of the billionaires children of government officials?
Wow. I had completely forgotten how cool it was playing with a hand outside the car window as a kid. It really was an aha moment.

A bit dangerous, I know.
errm... I said 'degree' didn't I ?

I meant that in any society the number of people that will make it big that have connections will outnumber those that do not.

It's very hard to 'make it on your own', in any society and China is (unsurprisingly) no exception.

News would have been 90% of Chinese billionaires (or millionaires or some other metric) had no family or other connection to power.

On another note, there are only 9 Chinese billionaires in all (10 if you count HK); see http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/10/07billionaires_The-World...
Ask HN: Good resource for finding a iPhone developer?
My startup is looking for an iPhone (and/or Blackberry) developer to work on some iPhone extensions to our .Net based web application.
I'm trying to track down an iPhone developer to write a little app as an extension to a .Net based website.

I'll go over a few of the required features to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

The web app is basically a collaboration tool (projects, forums, etc)
The iPhone app would need to be able to browse, search, read, and edit online project details (so all of this would be implemented on the server, the iPhone app would essentially just call certain dedicated webservices to get/set the required information)
The iPhone user would be able to take a photograph or video from the iPhone which would upload to the server.
Caching on the iPhone would be necessary (at least for v2.0) to handle disconnected sessions, with auto synching on app startup when re-connected.

I know nothing about iPhone development, should an app like this be fairly simple to develop for a moderately experienced iPhone developer?

Can anyone recommend any resources, or are any members here proficient in the art?

Contact Info: trevZorgoZuld@shaw.ca (remove the Z's)

Thanks for any replies.
A better more scientific and mathematically detailed explanation can be found if you google "how wings work" - http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0031-9120/38/6/001/pe3_6_001.p...

Thank you to the OP for pointing out the flaw in the popular explanation !
I believe that in language there is evidence that children that learn by having their teachers do sign-language as they speak teach them languages faster.

Furthermore academic skills is not really what the article seem to be after.
I have a hard time figuring out how an individual healthcare consumer would have any rational reason to "monitor and control their own costs"? If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.

There's no point at which the average person with a reasonable prognosis for even 1 more year of life says "gee, that sounds expensive, perhaps I should just die instead, so as to control my own cost to society [or my insurance company]."
I thought everyone knew this j/k. Really when I studied the Bernoulli principle in highschool it didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. If the curvature of a wing was so important then how did objects with no curvature at all gain any lift? For example gliders.

Bernoulli lift only really comes into effect once you have level flight. Then the curvature alone can provide enough lift to support the weight of the plane without inducing drag. The Koanda effect is where ailerons and flaps come into play. The produce additional lift but also contribute more drag. As the angle of attack increases laminar flow drops. Using the authors example, placing a glass in a stream of water redirects the flow, but you'll notice there is a bit that sort of fans out. That is the equivalent of spoiled air. Too much of it and you've lost all laminar airflow, bye bye lift.

Anyways, I'm getting out of my area of expertise. It's been ages since I studied aerospace and my AIAA bible is in my parents' garage.
The news was 90% of Chinese billionaires are actually kids of government officials. That would be like if the billionaires in the UK were children of parliamentary officials or if the billionaires in the USA were children of senators and representatives. It's wrong to equivocate the Chinese situation with simply having "connections." It's a fundamental structural difference between China and "western societies."

Also, what you're implying in the weak sense is probably wrong. Billionaire lists are easily found on the internet and if you look at the bios of the people on such lists, I would assert the opposite - most of the billionaires in western countries started out with few significant connections at all.
Yeah there's a difference between forcing a kid to program and making an environment that encourages tinkering when they want to.

You wouldn't build a car that required engine maintenance to start up expecting that you'd get a bunch of mechanics.
Morris (never heard him referred to as 'rtm' before) doesn't deserve any fame for his actions.
By your rationale, Perl and Python are C.

Since Matlab has language constructs for doing matrix operations, it is better for manipulating matrices than C. That Matlab compiles down to C, or calls into C libraries, is an implementation detail.
Too bad Google Voice only works in the US. And it will probably stay that way for a long time (couple years). I guess there's a good opportunity there, replicating Grand Central for the rest of the world.
This guy seems to have a knack for crappy little cars:

1965 - Started selling the Subaru 360, which was named most unsafe car in America. Then was selling Subaru franchises(back then Subaru was worse than Daewoo)

1970s - Started his own sports car company, that had horrible sales and was forced to close.

1980s- Started selling Fiats(crap in the 80s).

1980s- Started selling Yugos. And we all know how great they were.
Advocates Ask Google for Privacy Guarantees in Online Library
I think the disruption is mostly about the quality of competition. Nobody else really focused on the quality of the search results. Heck, Bing is not that bad, but they are still more focused on the GUI vs. higher quality search.
I can't imagine that it's harder to bribe people in China than in the USA. In fact, I think much, much more bribery per capita happens in China than in the US. The Chinese legal system is very weak.
I would suggest that insurance policies be required to send a certain amount back to the purchaser each year in the form of a check -- say 20% of premiums. The total amount would be reduced by the amount of services used that year.

If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.

I completely agree that if you have a life-threatening illness cost is not an option. But as a healthy young-person, when I get a cold or something I just take some aspirin and wait to get better. Same goes for ear infections. There is a lot of room for flex in how people get treatment for non-life-threatening illnesses. What the stats show is that the less skin in the game people have, the more likely they are to go to the emergency room for things like common colds.
Gates: son of a lawyer, Buffet: son of a politician, Slim: son of a real estate broker and so on...

Connections help. In a totalitarian society they help more.

The only thing that stops the situation from being much worse is term limits.
I think you should provide a way for people to contact you.
not harder per se, but there its done as a backroom deal. In USA, we just call it lobbying and campaign contributions.
Under a nuclear cloud
Sorry, updated....
Buffet's father wasn't a politician until after Buffet was rich. If anything, in western countries it's easier to become a government official because you're related to someone rich than it is to get rich because you're the kid of a government official.
This is exactly what happened in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. In 1985, when I finished high school, there were less than 10,000 seats in the whole state of (about 60 million people). Today, there are more than 150,000. Today, practically any kid that wants to attend an engineering college can get into one, and many seats actually go unfilled. The quality of the education is spotty, but really, what this education achieved is a kind of placebo effect - give confidence to people, which is what Kumar also describes. This explosion in number of colleges directly played a role in the emergence of the IT industry, which is primarily based in southern India.

I wrote about it in 2006: http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/01/19/a-not-so-brief-...

I reposted it now at Zoho:
http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-it-happened-in-southern-in...
Race is on for space-junk alarm system
Most of my articles are on my blog rather than my business site -- I only put them there when I need to use Rails to spit something out for the article.

The blog is at http://www.kalzumeus.com .
Starting a High Tech Business: Only the Employees Will Care
I accidentally downmodded you, but agree completely with your comment.
Bernoulli's principle also doesn't explain how planes can fly upside-down.
15 life lessons learned from SimCity
IPhone Programming Tutorial
Your contention is interesting. Let us compare cancer survival rates.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/561737
Breast cancer survival rates in the US are 90.1%, versus 79.0% in Europe. The prostate cancer survival rate in the US is 99.3%, as compared to 77.5% in Europe.

We get better health care in the US.

The US also subsidizes drug discovery for the rest of the world. In the late 90's, I worked for a company that made robots used for drug discovery. Every once in a while, they would put up a chart showing year over year growth. There was a healthy, steady climb until the Hillary health care initiative. The company almost went out of business. Drug companies froze spending on drug discovery because it wasn't worth their while to spend the hundreds of millions to bring a new drug to market if the US was going to go to a single-payer system. US drug prices pay for R&D, and all the countries with enforced pricing get a free ride.
SmartLipo - Find Out the Basics of This Non-Invasive Procedure
Will Google Wave succeed inside the enterprise?
No he wasn't, from the wikipedia article on Warren Buffet:

"After his father was elected to Congress, Buffett was educated at Woodrow Wilson High School"
Yes, I linked to a similar post at the bottom of mine--as well as a few other resources. Many get put off by a four-page explanation, however, and move on to other things. I like to try and give the full punch in a single page and then provide resources to go into more detail if so desired.
I'm not sure what you mean by "without female influence." In humans, semi-monogamous coupling is an a result of the extraordinary expense (in time and energy) of raising a human child. Read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond for a full discussion on how the spectrum of human monogamy - I say "semi-monogamous" since cheating is prevalent in all humans, and he provides potential reasons for why this is so.
Whoops, I got my dates wrong. I concede - you win.
The Argument Pyramid
Not this week anyway - http://ow.ly/ibcK.
I must be one of the luck SOBs who learned proper HTML and web development first, having picked up this whole web fad just in the last year (took a long hiatus, my last web app before that was written in 2003.) I have html-generating macros and I use legend, label and abbr within fieldsets throughout my code base (though I usually forget they even exist until I see the generated code.)
That is not the majority opinion. That's reasoning is too simple; it takes no account for the cost of raising children.

Using other primates as support is dangerous. Raising a human child is much more time consuming than raising a gorilla. Gorillas can forage for themselves much earlier than a human child can provide food for itself. Our ecological niche is using tools, so we have to train our children how to use them. This takes time.

As the expense in terms of time and energy of raising an offspring increases, it puts selection pressure towards monogamy.
This could not be more false. I worked at Inktomi for four years. Inktomi provided search results to a number of customers (MSN, AOL, Hotbot, Yahoo) through an api but did not control the UI. When Google came into the picture it had a superior UI compared to the horrible clutter on our clients' portal pages.

Our management believed that people used Google because it had better results, but our internal blind tests showed that it wasn't the case. We built internal metrics frameworks and improved our result sets until they were at least as good as google by objective and subjective measurements. We stayed focused on the quality of search results for a long time and disregarded the UI effect as we didn't control it. As a result we lost and ended up being acquired by Yahoo for a tiny fraction of what the company had been worth at its peak.