skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article links to the study:

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/13/2007-catalyst-census-...

I didn't have time to read the actual paper. I'm guessing the paper ignores any other context aside from hard numbers within a specific time period; so long term plays (with short term losses) are ignored.
Not exactly, there's private healthcare in Canada, and in France, but the government provides free Healthcare. So they don't hold a monopoly unless it's legally enforced.
I've only ever seen statistics that compare the aggregate cost of health care relative to aggregate outcomes in the US vs other countries. Do you have more details on the delta between pricing for specific services?

It's generally very difficult to compare the cost of specific services in any meaningful way. For instance, many countries institute price controls on medication, cutting the cost of some prescriptions to 30% of what they'd cost in the US. However, some of these drugs were developed in the US based on US patent law and with the assumption of a certain amount of profit from US consumers. A price control in Canada is effectively subsidized by US consumers of a given drug, in lots of cases.

A great deal of the costs we pay come as a result of artificial scarcity of both drugs and medical services. The result of legislation, fears of malpractice, and prescription requirements mean that treating a simple sinus infection (which I can diagnose reasonably well myself) costs ~$150 or so after the doctor visit and trip to the pharmacy. There are a great many ways to attack that scarcity, but we're not really considering them (unfortunately).

Dean Kamen has a good point. The level of medical care we can provide to people is both insane and insanely expensive. High prices are rationing. What we need to do is attack the high prices that are artificially inflated.
Insofar as everyone I know wishes they could quit using one (due to the well publicized problems), but very few can do it?

If only there was some patch, software or otherwise.
> I was specifically responding to this sentence "PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test". I doubt that somehow!

But you'd be wrong.
Terry Pratchett on the right to die
It's worth mentioning that the usage of dovecot makes this configuration. I've had problems with using offlineimap + {mutt, maildir}. When offlineimap does maildir syncing it doesn't have the same information that it does if the maildirs are managed by an actual imap server.

Specifically, if I moved an email from my inbox to a tag/folder, offlineimap would end up just tossing it into the Trash. I think this was because offlineimap stores metadata in the file name of the emails in the maildir, and mutt doesn't preserve that when moving from one maildir to another. So offlineimap would delete when syncing the inbox, and then gmail would maybe block it when it tried to sync it to the specified tag/folder (?). It's worth noting that this was with the Gmail IMAP option of 'delete when all visible tags removed' was enabled, and 'All Mail' was hidden from IMAP (but that was because without doing that it was a PITA to delete emails, b/c I would have to remove them from the folder and from All Mail... not to mention that syncing All Mail means downloading all your emails twice).
Dell XPS M1530 Laptop A Impressive Performing Laptop.
Well said. He makes an argument that people are trying to "instill fear in ordinary Americans" and seems to think the system is working perfectly, without giving those that have no access to health care today even a token sentence.

The argument that those that can afford it should just continue spending loads of money on health care and eventually, through some unspecified process, this will make life better for all those who don't have access to health care at all sounds like a variant of "trickle-down" voodoo economics to me.
Which is, I think, what I said, except for the part about the web application (which obviously doesn't involve your phone making a call).
All I get is a blank page too.
I was very curious to look at this because I've been doing something very similar - for Smalltalk, instead of Python.
The only concern I have with giving programming puzzles for hiring is that it can be quite the burden on candidates. This is fine if your company is a top player and candidates REALLY REALLY want to work for you, but if you aren't that established (like as a startup), the candidates might not like the amount of effort needed to apply. We tried this for some interns a while ago and about half balked at the idea and it wasn't necessarily the "bad" half.

Top talent are going to have options. If you ask too much too early, they may just wonder if it's worth 10 hours of coding up front to get the honour of applying to your company. One should always look for code before hiring, but it shouldn't be done in a way where you are filtering out the non-desperate as well as the incompetent.
I'd much rather quit smoking than give up my iPhone. On second thought, I do want to quit smoking and have no desire to be rid of my iPhone.
A compensating factor could be the increasing percentage of women in college.

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleColleg...
To quote Doctorow: "it takes something damned important to get me to link to the vile Daily Mail. This qualifies."
Your fibonacci algorithm is crap. You're tree-recursively calculating the exact same values over and over and over and over again. Just try running it sometime on a large n if you want to test your computer's ability to stall and ramp up the cooling fans.

"do you make racing games?"

That's a question to ask first, not second. Maybe he's making a "Pimp My Ride" style game where the actual driving part is less important but you need detailed modeling of the seats and the ability to add a bunch of random shit to the interior of the car. Maybe he's making a CAD tool for people to do body design, so you need to be able to do computational fluid dynamics on it and test weight balances, but also be able to visualize it in high resolution to see if it looks cool and to print mockups for focus groups to say "this looks like a kickass car".
"But really, what do we want as a society? For a two-digit number of extremely wealthy people to have access to the world's best prosthetics, stuff that is in the realm of sci-fi? Or for everyone to have access to "good enough" prosthetic technology that advances more slowly?"

I don't see this as an either-or situation; don't we have both right now? Especially if you look at legs instead of arms.

"... his own highest-profile project; the Segway hasn't gotten significantly cheaper or more accessible despite years of R&D,"

That doesn't make any sense at all. The Segway is the cheaper, more-accessible version of the IBOT, a mobility system. Besides, http://web.mit.edu/first/segway/ is one of many <$1000, DIY Segway projects, so this tech is getting cheaper and more accessible.
It had JOINs but a lousy, lousy optimizer, also sub-SELECTs were (are?) a problem. I can't say that having a sort-of knowledge of some (very little)of MySQL is equivalent to having a working knowledge of SQL. Most commands that SQL users would probably need to look up would be the DDL commands, not simple (yes, it really is simple) stuff like LEFT OUTER and INNER JOINs. Also while saying MySQL didn't have SPs is an (fair) indictment of MySQL, you using application logic instead of JOINs is an indictment of you and your supposed 'working SQL knowledge'
Have you looked at http://neo4j.org/ ?
How to be happier now
$1000/month for a car?

I wasn't spending anywhere near that when I was making payments and now that the car is paid for, I'm spending even less.

Of course, my car isn't in NYC, but if NYC is causing cars to be expensive, that's on NYC, not cars.
The only ones that somewhat depress me is a particular class of bad developer: Fresh out of college, these people have their curriculum nailed... and know absolutely nothing else.

One example that really struck me was an interviewee that I asked to write a simple pre-order traversal on a seven-node tree that we print out for our interviews. Instead I got a moderately lengthy and correct description of how to search for a value in a sorted binary tree. Correct, except for A: it wasn't the question I asked and B: immediate visual examination of the tree we were looking would reveal it was clearly not sorted. Other things in this interview led me to the conclusion that I got that answer because this person had studied that topic, but almost couldn't even hear, couldn't perceive a question that wasn't essentially right off an exam.

These are the ones who depress me a little, because they have clearly done everything everyone told them to do (study hard, do well on tests, etc) and must have some significant raw intelligence to be able to do this well on a challenging curriculum... yet, for all that, they have walked away with so very little useful knowledge or skills. I also feel some anger at the system that they have learned too well to navigate... but by the time they get to me, it's too late to change anything.

I comfort myself in the near-sure knowledge they will find a job somewhere. Some percentage of them will even adapt to the real world and perhaps they will become great programmers. I don't know. I can't know. That's life.

But I can't in good conscience give a thumbs up for them. We are willing to train solid developers and we have a track record of hiring people that don't even know the language they will be working in (since they have demonstrated the ability to learn languages in the past), but you can only take that so far.

On the other hand, those who sat in college for four+ years and know neither the curriculum, nor any other skills, just barely squeaking by with the necessary grades and forgetting everything as soon as the class is over, well, they had every chance to realize they were in trouble and didn't take it. I don't feel depressed about them at all. That such people exist is just a fact of life.
I note that the relatively little regulated hedge funds did NOT collapse and need a taxpayer bailout in the current recession.

Folks like to trot out hedge funds as bad guys, but in fact they do a ton of good, and prove that a lightly regulated environment works as well (or much better) than operating with the government's hands all over them.
They mention run code run (http://runcoderun.com/) which is hosted CI.
Can't give up photoshop and windows 7 from XP was a dead easy upgrade.
Ask HN: Corporation types and "maximizing shareholder value"?
I've been wondering for a while if there's a form of corporation that doesn't force the company/board to, as I've seen it called, "maximize shareholder value".

Of course, making money for the shareholders and company is always a driving goal. What worries me are situations where making money for shareholders, and the survival/growth of the business, are at odds.

One possibility would be a policy change that has the potential to generate income, at the cost of user trust/loyalty. (Beacon, for instance.)

Are there any corporation types that handle such a situation better than others? (From the perspective of the founders.)
This is just an observation, but at Stockholm airport (ARN), I've seen the baggage handlers scanning the tags on the bags as they pull them out of the airplane. This seems to indicate that there's at least some data on bag progress.
"Health care providers don't care about cost - it's passed along to insurance companies and consumers anyway. Insurance companies care about cost, but not really - it's easily passed to sponsoring employers or individual buyers anyway. Really, the only people that truly want cost reduced are the endpoint patients and their employers, who generally lack the clout and influence to push for real cost reductions. The entire system is broken. Costs have not lowered for health care, and will not lower, until the system is reorganized such that cost reduction becomes advantageous to all stakeholders."

I'm not sure if we really agree all that much or not, but I do agree with this. There's no way to keep from ballooning costs when the people paying are insulated from what they're paying for.

Unfortunately, it's largely broken as a result of some really strange incentives and a belief that employers should be responsible for their employees health care (rather than just paying employees and letting them deal with it). HMOs, tax incentives to employers to provide health care, tax incentives to employees to take it, are all terrible, terrible things.

Fixing it will require that people "pay" for what they don't feel they're paying for right now. I dunno about everyone else, but I'd rather be getting the extra $1200/yr my employer contributes to my health care and dealing in an actual free market than what we have now. I think we'd all be paying a lot less, and getting better service.
> They probably act more ethically

You don't have much experience with women.
You know, despite the essay's claim, you cannot blame it just on the unemployment. It says Detroit and Flint are approaching 10%, but the national average was 9.5% in June and was undoubtably worse, since there were several problems with how they calculated it. (I have seen estimates that the actual national unemployment rate for June could have been as high as 11%.)
Ok so hopefully the places where you used to work hired someone that wouldn't write horribly inefficient client-side code to join two tables together when its a SQL RDBMS, and sped up those applications|sites considerably.
IIRC, getmail and fetchmail both are focused on delivery of email and not with local management of emails. Using IMAP, to fetch emails in such a fashion doesn't really work. You would basically have to tell getmail/fetchmail to download only new emails... and even then you would end up with duplicate emails between runs.

On the other hand, Gmail's POP is non-standard. It records the last time that you pinged the POP server and only shows messages that were received after that time to the POP client talking to it. That's why it tells you the last time you fetched in the POP3 settings. Gmail's IMAP is more like a standard IMAP server and will show you all the email in the folder regardless of the last time that it was run.

To use IMAP effectively in the way that you want to, you would have to use something like offlineimap that syncs with IMAP, and somehow tell it to not delete emails that were fetched from the server. Or you could do full syncing with offlineimap and then do snapshot backups (rsync,rdiff,etc) of the gmail-backup folder. That way, you have the state of your Gmail account at different points. You could even have it do the snapshots as part of the syncing process (e.g. run the snapshot updater, then run offlineimap to sync new changes).
Ultimate RISC, the ONE instruction computer
Sony Ericsson XPeria X1 – Windows Mobile | Modern-Gadgets.Com
> Invalid refutation, I said "if you used an RDBMS and ". That "and" was a boolean and.

Valid refutation. You can use an RDBMS without making use of most of its facilities, and indeed, that is the typical usage case.

You can easily have a non-trivial app which makes what you'd probably consider trivial usage of a database.

> someone claiming knowledge of an RDBMS and not knowing how to do a simple join across two tables is like someone claiming to be an expert in c and not knowing how to write a for loop (let alone use pointers)..

You're mixing up "working knowledge of SQL" with "expert knowledge of RDBMSes". I agree I am nowhere close to an RDBMS expert. However, I can use SQL, which was the point of the original post.

> after claiming to have worked with RDBMS for ages

Something is wrong in your mental model of my description. I used MySQL for years, starting many years ago. I did not say I was an expert in RDBMSes, or used advanced functionality in any sense, and I said the join functionality was done at the application level. My usage of SQL was basic, but I have a working knowledge of it. If there's something I need but don't know, I can read the docs and do it.

> it would take what, one day of reading a basic book on SQL to understand what a join is and formulate a query?

Reading an SQL book doesn't mean you're going to recall the syntax, until you have written queries a number of times by hand. I agree it is not complicated. I do not agree that asking someone to write a JOIN tells you anything about WHY they can't do it.

> The danger of NOT using a quick and easy litmus test is that all kinds of idiots get through to your personal interview stage

You'd probably filter out Pete Norvig, and Linus, and who knows how many other expert programmers, if you asked them to write an SQL join off the top of their head.
How Much Will the Post Office Put Up With?
Word's change tracking gives people history. No merging, but most seem able to live with that. Worst case some admin assistant has to piece all the changed documents together by hand.
Since Dean Kamen makes medical devices, doesn't he have a conflict of interest?

Basically, if the government tries to control costs, he will probably earn less per device.
Health care is just like any other product or service. It will be sold at market prices.
Not sure what "sexier" means exactly, but the design of the LightBox is simpler and therefore it is fit for a wider variety of site designs.
Does your company use Python? The Python Software Foundation wants to know.
Consider an XML file consisting of one long line of text. A diff would not be very useful in that case.
It's funny. Aversion to suicide always strikes me as one of those throwbacks to the olden days where just about everything was frowned on.

I remember in 6th form we had a debating class on this topic and I was the only who would try and argue in favour of the right to die (in actual fact I am somewhat apathetic in opinion on this: beyond the thought that each to his own decisions). Everyone else thought it seemed distasteful.

Whatever the views and rights/wrongs I think it's a good thing the UK courts are now reviewing the law in relation to assisted suicide for relatives of those who travel to Switzerland to die.
Print Link: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health_medicine/4327...
>but ultimately one that has been soundly disproved by the success of public health systems in most of Europe and Canada.

Yes, but the success of those systems is dependent upon the (semi) free-market health system in the United States.
I have enough SQL knowledge to replicate most websites I see. I am also familiar with it enough to look up things I don't know and use them. If that's not "working knowledge", you're using some different definition.

You can have working knowledge of e.g. calculus but need to look things up because you haven't memorized everything yet, and can learn some new method quickly. Someone without working knowledge would simply be lost, no matter what cheat sheets you put in front of them.
Given the fact that a graph database does not meet any of the design criteria listed why exactly would one consider neo4j as an option? It is great for what it does, but completely unsuited to the task described by the parent comment.

There are a few features of riak that appear somewhat related to similar features of neo4j (the concept of ancestor/child/sibling links which is only lightly explained in the available docs and does not seem to be really thought out well given the documentation that is available at the moment) but if you want real graph operations you would not use something like riak...
Patterns in the Group Mind
Not only does a decreased rate job losses fail to indicate things are getting better, it also fails to indicate a "shift in the economy" (as the headline claims).

When a system changes from one steady state to another, as it approaches the new state it will tend to change less dramatically (e.g., a hot cup of coffee changes temperature more slowly as it approaches room temp). In other words, a slowing rate of job losses may simply mean that the economy is settling in to a new state determined by a shift that happened long ago.
3,000-year-old Michael Jackson statue?
You also see cigarettes used as props in movies. Will the iphone take its place?

I'm trying to replace that classic image of two lovers in a bed smoking, with two people twiddling with their iphones.
I totally agree, but I also think that introverted programmers work better in the situation you describe, whereas extroverts feel better about talking-out solutions, even over the phone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling you an introvert, but I, as an introvert, have experienced this.

Don't forget, our society rewards extroverts, is built for extroverts, and this is one way the ruling extroverts can weed out introverts.
It is extremely distasteful. I'm as socially liberal as anyone, but I'm generally against the right to die for the mentally ill. This is probably because I am the child of mental health professionals and my parents have very strong beliefs, but I'm against the right to death for everyone because most physically healthy people that want to die are not in the right frame of mind -- with proper treatment, they would not want to die. There are some untreatable cases and there are grey areas, but I don't think it is a good idea to open up suicide to everyone.

Terminal illness is completely different. Except for religious morality, it seems like a very one sided debate.
Ideally, I think what you want is an upgradable car, like a jet fighter, that can maintain a single body and have replaceable components.

I don't think we'll ever get that though because consumers are too fickle, and there is no real benefit to the manufacturer.
I suspect the "support group" is one guy doing it part-time. After a few dozen identical complaints he probably gets mighty jaded, and you see the results.

I'm assuming here the "support group" can't change the main page, and whoever CAN doesn't want to.

Too bad nobody is weevil enough to sign up a few million bogus new users.
"You're mixing up "working knowledge of SQL" with "expert knowledge of RDBMSes. I agree I am nowhere close to an RDBMS expert. However, I can use SQL, which was the point of the original post."

Hmm you seem to be laboring under a concept that to know how to join two tables you need to be an RDBMS "expert" and "working knowledge" is not sufficient.

On the contrary, if you can't join two tables with SQL, you don't have any "working knowledge of SQL". Neither can you "use SQL" worth a damn. Every answer you make exposes the hollowness of your supposed "working knowledge"!

"However, I can use SQL"

Sure, as long as you query single tables (and do joins "at the application level") ;-)
I'm halfway through, and there's a strange conflict between the interviewer and Stroustrup. The interviewer won't let go the idea that Concepts completely failed and are now dead. Stroustrup is doing a good job of explaining why he doesn't think they failed (and I agree) and that they're not dead.

This is worth reading because what Stroustrup says has value, but the questions themselves are loaded.
Howard Rheingold used the phrase "lightweight digital refreshment" in 2001.
CPAN runs code automatically.
No, it's not needed here. Metafilter predates the digg/reddit style of user moderation. Anyone there can post directly to the front page, and only mods can remove posts. And I think there's only like 3 mods.
"but it's more sexier"

English fail. That's where I stopped reading.

I'm in love with the new media revolution, but it's been awful for the grammar Nazi inside me.

</grumpy>