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. But to suggest that we need to completely dismantle our existing system seems rather drastic as we do get some significant benefits including the level of medical innovation that the US supplies the world. Granted, if the US is subsidizing the rest of the world through inefficient spending domestically this isn't ideal either.

Just a reminder: http://www.gallup.com/poll/102934/majority-americans-satisfi... - instead of working at the people who aren't satisfied with their insurance or don't have any, we'd rather create an entirely new system from scratch?

As for higher administrative costs, as a number cruncher and one who has worked with non profits, this number can be both juiced and reduced depending on the operational strategy that's taken. For instance, despite higher administrative expenses, medicare fraud (15+%) is thought to be considerably higher than private healthcare - so there's a trade off here between administration and waste elsewhere. I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here but given the fraud numbers, that case does seem compelling.

I'm not fond of the US insurance industry as a whole given that it's all third party payors (ie your employer chooses your insurance, not you) which introduces all sorts of wacky results but I find it odd that they wouldn't rather give users of the system more power rather than centralizing it with governments. Again - look at the stunning er, competence with which the bail out package has been run.

also fyi - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/07...

update - apparently administrative costs are higher not lower for Medicare than private insurance, check this link out: http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/wm2505.cfm
What The New York Times isn't doing.
How to Cure Health Care
by Milton Friedman:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3459466.html
What is done in that 80-90%, and how do you optimize it?
The News About the Internet
I'd say "packed" is a bit of an overstatement. Here's the list:

* Support for CDMA phones (Hello, Sprint!)
* Text-to-speech
* Loads of new widgets, including one that allows for WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS/Email toggling and Brightness adjustment right from the homescreen.
* Official support for multitouch (This was previously available through hackery - we’re not sure yet if this will be in the final build)
* “Search integrated into everything”
* WPA Enterprise WiFi encryption support
* VPN support
* Automated backups
* “Tons of performance [tweaks]“

It's good to see progress, but that's hardly earth shaking...

As a G1 owner my list of priorities looks quite different, too. I'd prefer if they fixed the outstanding bugs in core functionality and added a calendar that deserves the name. Multitouch, well, can't say I ever missed it.
"In fact [...], I quickly close the tab and forget the contents of the article or why I thought it was insightful in the first place"

Do you think the problem is "follow me" or "on twitter"? If the second, in my opinion you have a deeper problem than just hating a certain kind of messaging service.
If the problem is "follow me", then why even mention twitter?
"Google has been disruptive to industry as a whole"

Come to think of it, has it been? Surely without Google, some other search engine would have filled the gap?

I see some smaller sub-disruptiveness, such as popularizing AJAX with Google Maps, but overall, that statement seems exaggerated?
I couldn´t disagree with you both more.

I´m sorry, but webapps development can be much, much, much harder than desktopapps developement. Take into account a single parameter: scalability.

Note: I expect we are talking about real app programming, and not hobbie programming.
From the rules: http://www.netflixprize.com/rules

When the RMSE of a submitted prediction set on the quiz subset improves beyond the qualifying RMSE an electronic announcement will inform all registered Participants that they have thirty (30) days to submit additional candidate prediction sets to be considered for judging. At the end of this period, qualifying submissions will be judged (see Judging below) in order of the largest improvement over the qualifying RMSE on the test subset.
Did those actually get on to Hacker News? And 7 points? Seriously?
Most Americans are satisfied with their health care because most Americans have employer-provided insurance, and so are utterly ignorant of the costs involved. Unfortunately for these people, the skyrocketing costs will affect them, too, and soon - either through flattened or depressed wages, reduced or eliminated health coverage, or both. With insurance premiums rising 10 - 20% annually, it's only a matter of time.
By your rules a community of mostly blue eyed people has something genetically wrong with them.

Well, yes. There are such communities, and they are inbred.
The biggest threat for your children is their family and their friends. Only in about 10% of cases sexual abuse is commited by strangers. Instead of having them walk another route, why not forbid your relatives from seeing them?
And arguably the best way to control said costs is through introduction of competition and also giving people choice (with cost trade offs). Isn't the alternative government price controls? One of the arguments that Greg Mankiw makes is that at least with private institutions you have choice however limited, to move to another institution whereas this isn't the case with government.

I'm not sure that healthcare costs will necessarily increase over time - there are some pretty stunning developments in area of ambulatory care with dramatic savings for insurers (not to mention improvements in quality of care at the same time).
I totally disagree. And I've made complex web apps since when CGIs in C where the only way to have dynamic generated content.

In fact I think it is the contrary: for small sites (and small budgets) frameworks can be ok. For big websites custom code is a must.

The idea that using a framework makes code easier to maintain is the complete opposite of my experience.

Big (serious) projects require a lot of custom logic which you should write yourself anyway. And it is a lot more painful since you have to stick to the framework logic if you don't want to break things as soon as you update the framework version or if you don't want to make the code unmaintainable.

I have made my own libraries which are designed in a modular fashion (not OO) that I constantly improve and reuse. Code is clean and you can easily understand the flow of each section.

A MVC framework is not the only way to have clean (modular) code.

Your reasoning would apply if you aren't good at designing software architecture, which is a recipe for disaster especially on big projects.
They're more likely to get hit by a car.

How many sex offenders have offended random school kids walking to school past their house? I'd say it's likely to be miniscule.
My favorite line:

“For a year, you walk, eat, sleep, and dream IIT,” he said. “There’s no room for anything else.”
I'm a bit disappointed that anyone who has seen a few of The Daily Show's interviews is at all surprised by any of this.

They quite clearly do it for laughs. It's not supposed to be journalism. As Jon Stewart famously put it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE#t=7m15s
It seems like just a consequence of basic statistics (central limit theorem?). Any algorithm you create has some random bias. By blending, you take several algorithms with random bias and average them together, reducing the overall bias (assuming the algorithms converge toward the correct result).
I'm talking about professional development.

And scalability is one of the reason for which you may want to avoid frameworks.

If you're a professional you want to fully understand your data and how it is generated/modified if you want to solve both functional and load scalability issues.
funny, yes. Interesting, not at all.
One can agree with (almost) every specific point Krugman makes, and yet disagree with his conclusion.

I don't think many economists would claim that free markets offer a perfect solution regarding health care. Rather, they would argue that the alternatives (for example, a government run system) are worse.
I'm not saying MVC is the only way. I've not even mentioned MVC. What I gather though is that when you hear someone mention frameworks you assume they are referring to the railish frameworks of recent. A framework to me is a set of libraries and a structure to better layout and facilitate the development of your application.

It also doesn't have to be a premade/3rd party one as you've demonstrated by essentially creating your own framework and just calling it by a different name(collection of libraries).

A recipe for disaster in my opinion would be a large project with no code structure/layout guidelines.
This was a totally disappointing read. Like stated in the other comments, most of the techniques are sketchy and questionable. Furthermore, there is almost no advice on how to reach your targeted customers / business partners.

Most of the techniques appear a little desperate and wouldn't impress me as a potential customer or business partner.
Was YouOS flash based as well? I tried this out and it's fairly impressive. But there was some lag in using it which I suspect is because of all the Flash.
I don't know. I found Dustin's original article pretty much to be a hack for trying to get twitter followers. He just dressed it up in UI-optimization garb.It was nicely done, no doubt. But the purpose was twitter followers, which I'm sure he got.

As for the point you make "I may be naive, but I would like people to follow me due to my interesting insights, and not because of some cognitive hack."

This is exactly what I commented on at the time of Dustin's article -- show the reader what's in it for them. Why should they become a follower? Concentrate on the value proposition instead of the gimmick.

My comment didn't receive that many upvotes as I remember. Sad fact is, a lot of people would rather focus on techniques than value. After all, you can simply copy a technique. Adding value -- saying something interesting and worthwhile to the reader -- is a lot more work.
As a web designer here is my stance:

- I will only use free fonts

- I will only use patent-unencumbered fonts

- I will only use less-than-100k fonts

That's my credo.
I'm not sure that healthcare costs will necessarily increase over time

From the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, via the Kaiser Family Foundation:

http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/7692_02.pdf

Spending on health care, which is a projected to be 17.6% of the U.S.
gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009, has consistently
grown faster than the economy overall since the 1960s.

In 1970, U.S. health care spending was about $75
billion, or $356 per resident, and accounted for
7.2% of GDP.

Health care spending has risen about 2.4
percentage points faster than GDP since 1970.

Please tell us the source of your touching faith that this rather well-established long-term trend -- one which has already bankrupted millions -- will spontaneously reverse itself.
There may not be any specific reason for a startup failure. It is quite normal that only a small percentage of startups find a unique spot on the 'fitness landscape' that would allow them to grow and prosper. The rest may be just as well equipped and funded as the lucky ones, but still they will perish. Randomness among reasons for success dwarfs most of other factors.

The rational strategy is not to try to discover some 'success recipe' (there is none), but to do a lot of tinkering, be prepared for many false starts, and make sure that the unavoidable failures will not kill you as an entrepreneur.
Really? Do you have the stats on that?
While I agreed it was a good watch, instead I found it taught me what not to do and what to watchout for.

What struck me was how he often talks about the future as the obvious, when in fact, he doesn't know. "Everyone knows that Chinese cars are going to flood the US market". I guess that's what some call entrepreneurial optimism or being a visionary, but to not admit that your vision won't pan out doesn't win me over.

There were a couple scenes of him saying, it's his way, or the highway. Table pounding, everyone's-an-asshole, I make the final decision. In fact, they start off arguing about the logo. That doesn't inspire any sense of leadership, and doesn't make me want to help him achieve his vision.

It struck me also that his company didn't make anything. So when a single deal fell through, they went under as well.

He does have good qualities, like persistence and making arguments for how a deal might benefit the other side, but in the end, it seemed like he'd be a person really hard to work for and with. Life's too short to deal with that, and there are plenty of other entrepreneurs.
In this case, of course, I agree.

The term framework is almost exclusively used for object oriented designs. That's what I was arguing against.

Of course one should make, use and keep improving his own libraries.

And there's nothing wrong in using other people code either. Provided that it is built in a modular standalone fashion and so it can be easily included / replaced / updated / removed without breaking things.
Hackers target Australian festival showing Uyghur film
That's like saying you shouldn't buy a lottery ticket because its unlikely you are going to win. Littlewood's law says we are likely to experience events that are one in a million relatively frequently.

So are you really saying that you wouldn't change their route to school, given that there is somewhere at least 0.8-1.5% chance of this sex offender reoffending with a non-family member? (Assuming a reoffence rate of 8-15%, with 10% of those people offending with non-family members)
Good points. There are a lot of funny numbers going around. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Administrative percentages are lower for medicaid than for private insurance mainly because people on public insurance spend a lot more medical dollars than those covered by the private sector. Since administrative costs usually tie to recipient, you have less recipients receiving more money, driving down percentages.
And the way you phrased your earlier comment, you make it sound like it's therefore OK to be prejudiced against people with blue eyes.

Maybe you personally aren't, and quite possibly that's not what you mean, but it is an interpretation of what you are saying.

If it's not what you mean, I suggest you think more carefully about how you say things.
This is the unavoidable consequence of China's political/economic system. It's not surprising at all.

What makes me worry is that the Chinese government has a far larger influence on Chinese companies than most other countries and that makes economic reliance on China a very dangerous move.

It also makes people used to totalitarian regimes to the point of making them tolerable. They shouldn't be. Chinese people deserve better.
GroupThink and Political Correctness in Academia
I got through about half of my list.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/07/26/practical-conversion-tip...
Practical Conversion Tips for Selling Software
Maybe. Kind of tricky to compare when you have different demographics in so many ways - different aged populations would be a huge factor. A lot of government healthcare at the top of that graph if you forget about focusing on Denmark.
> Theft means taking someone's property without their consent.

Actually, it doesn't. Well, it certainly isn't the whole story.

IANAL, but this snippet from a web page accords almost precisely with my memory of what I learned when I had cause to deal with such a matter professionally:

> A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly
> appropriates property belonging to another with
> the intention of permanently depriving the other
> of it ...

According to law, it's not theft if you did it honestly, or if you intended to give it back. "Consent" is not part of the legal definition.

EDIT: I note that the wikipedia article mentions consent. These things will differ between English, American and other country's laws.

Certainly in the case of taxes the intent is to deprive permanently, so it comes down to whether it's dishonest. Since the government makes the laws, and the government won't want taxation to be declared theft, we can deduce that taxation isn't dishonest.

According to the government.
Watch the YSlow guys and be enlightened. Everything they produce about the subject (and I don't just mean the plugin) is solid gold. They are easily the best "Follow these simple directions and you will make money" technical material I've ever seen.

video of talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA

slides of another: http://www.slideshare.net/stoyan/high-performance-web-pages-...
Breaking Cyphers using DNA based Computation
This article is quite old. You'll find more recent use cases/examples on the current HTML5 editor's draft (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html). In its temporal context the author was right (fieldset/legend/abbr weren't that used) but fortunately times have changed a bit and things aren't as bad as he describes.
What You Learned About How Planes Fly Was Probably Wrong
It depends on what you mean by expensive. In home nursing care is horribly expensive on a benefit per dollar spent. Open heart surgery can be far cheaper relative to medical benefit.

Look at the Japan model where public money is used to drive costs down but there is a side channel for private hospital rooms, in home care, homeopathy, and other things which provide little benefit vs cost.

Basically, everyone get's the high reward treatments, but when it comes to drugs which might possibly reduce your risk for X slightly, well that's up to you.

PS: If it's cheep and does little it's still expensive relative to gain.
Specifying per-browser CSS is hardly the problem.
This guy's blog is so much better than the Vice video. Even when alienated by whats going on, they continue to try to be respectful of the people they are with. What a novelty.
Which to my mind seem misguided to.

It's not about government vs. private market, but about whether a society is willing to pay in solidarity with their peers for the less often but expensive and perhaps complicated procedures trough taxation.

Or whether they think that it is better to have a system where those who can afford get the best treatment and pay through their insurance.

IMHO a modern society finds a balance between what to lift collectively and what to make a personal responsibility. Not because it is moral just, but because it is financially a more useful model as long as it is to expensive to run through the private system.

But again, it's not black and white, there are many arguments for and against.
There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market

This is easy to refute.

Flash back 100 years. People had healthcare they received from a family doctor. Insurance was non-existent, and the free market reigned.

In fact, it was the success of the free market in healthcare that led -- and continues to lead -- for more and more complicated, expensive treatments that save more and more lives.

I see three problems with markets and healthcare:

1) Insurance policies are so obfuscated that nobody understands what they are buying. Government needs to step in here and create standard insurance policy baselines. This will allow me to make an informed decision.

2) The people receiving healthcare have little or no input into cost control -- the people controlling costs have no "skin in the game" when it comes to value and quality of care. This decoupling needs to be fixed to encourage individuals to monitor and control their own costs.

3) If society has a greater interest in making sure there is a basic level of healthcare for all, as it does with say automotive insurance, then it should be a law for all people to have personal health insurance that covers these catastrophic scenarios. This would also mean allowing all insurance to be tax deductable and decoupling insurance completely from employers. It should be completely portable and associated just with the person.

Compared to some of the huge plans I've seen, these are really easy to describe. A bill could be just a couple of pages, and most Americans could understand exactly what is being passed. Instead of trying to have one huge law "fix" the problem, it simply provides some definitions and takes one huge problem and breaks it up into hundreds of millions of little problems that can be solved various ways.

Why we continue to think that some legislative body can create gargantuan one-size-fits-all solutions is beyond me. Evolution, machine learning, market theory, chaos -- lots of real, hard science says that solutions are iterative, incremental, and adaptive. Not complex and static.
Additionally, and this is a point often made by the YSlow guys (I am full of fanboy worship for them since they have made me thousands): Optimizing the black end is black magic full of interventions that you're never quite sure will work until you try them (and sometimes not even then), but optimizing the front end is a science. Front end best practices can be objectively demonstrated to work and they are repeatable.

Example: if your site loads 3 CSS files, and you combine them into 1 CSS file, you will experience performance increases. Period. If you do not gzip your HTML/Javascript/CSS yet, and you are not making a pathological example site just to prove me wrong, you will experience (probably significant!) performance increases. If you increase the number of static assets you load in parallel (for example, by splitting static assets over 2 additional subdomains), you will see most browsers have significant, automatic performance increases for pages that load non-trivial amounts of static assets. etc, etc
OP:

> However, creativity and math skills are not negatively correlated as this ad campaign states.

The ads shows creativity in a math setting, they don't imply any sort of correlation as the article claims and OP cites.
sorry way away, yeh the yslow stuff is really good, the new google tool is also handy although not particularly different.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ - also has a series of good website performance videos
If you agree (as I do) that the sooner a population "gets over it" and starts looking forward rather than back to improve their situation, the better it is for them, then suggesting that they "get over it" is good prescriptive advice.

The longer that a community keeps bringing up the past as a "reminder of what you did to us", the longer those after-effects persist. Nevermind that in almost every cse, the "you" isn't the one that did those things, and that the "us" wasn't the one to whom those things were done. (Where it is, by all means avail yourself of the remedies available in the legal system.)

Do you feel that scientists have made an adequate recovery from the persecution (and in instances, executions) of the past? Do you think that Christians have made an adequate recovery to a position of at least equality with the Romans?

I acknowledge that terrible, unconscionable things have been done to different groups of people by other different groups of people over time. We can concentrate our efforts on forcing atonement and punishment for the past acts of others who look like us, or we can shrug all that shit off and say "today and tomorrow are new days; let's make them the best days we can." Some people will choose the former and some the latter strategy. On balance, those who choose the latter strategy will be more successful and happier, whether they are members of the previously "superior" or "persecuted" population.