skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're recognizing, we're recognizing: http://minireference.com/ ;)

Part of the issue is that there are many moving parts in the value chain: students, profs, authors, publishers, distributors, and bookstores. The exploitation has persisted mainly because the decision maker in the sales process is not the client! Mainstream publishers are milking this fact as much as they possibly can. Insultingly so, you're right. The main problem is that schools and universities are incredibly slow to adapt so the racket continues, but with students taking textbook decisions into their own hands things will change.

I'm optimistic that within the next couple of years, the $130 price tags will be a thing of the past. The market says so.
Yes, thank you for Googling that for me. I think it's better to include at least some of those facts in the article, though.
The reason we haven't heard most of it is journalists. Snowden should have just posted it all to 4chan.
> If you are reducing readmission rates for hospital, especially with respect to certain core measures (and CHF is one of them), you are actually saving the hospital money. And we are not talking nickels and dimes - up to 2% of payment.

Yes and no. You are saving the hospital on their readmission penalties, but those currently only apply for three conditions (CHF is one of them). Furthermore, the penalties are not always enough to cover the increased revenue that the hospital gets from the readmission - in other words, some hospitals may actually make a profit from the readmission even when the penalty is factored in.

Also, the "up to 2%" is itself complicated. Because of the way the penalty is deducted, other seemingly-unrelated factors (like the patient and insurance demographics of the hospital) have a huge impact on how large the penalty is, even holding everything else constant.

> Hospitals can and should be charged for this

Currently, even the hospitals that receive the highest readmission penalties are not willing or able to pay (much) money for reducing readmissions. The way their budgets are structured doesn't really allow for this[0].

I say this from experience - my startup also creates a product that happens to reduce readmissions (though this is not our primary goal), and one of the reasons that we emphasize our other (larger) benefits for the hospitals is that most hospitals just won't pay much for a product that reduces readmissions.

On top of that, it's also a very crowded space. Health Recovery Solutions is a for-profit company that does more or less the same thing: http://www.healthrecoverysolutions.com/

[0] Yes, it's inefficient, but that's a separate discussion.
Lessons learned and takeaways from this experience:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7454441
I didn't say one should throw out decades of work; for a new company or and old company writing new software it makes sense picking technologies which run everywhere so you have a choice. There is no problem running Win if your admins are Win and most of your code is Win only; that makes a lot of sense. What makes no sense IMHO is picking Win blindly for new software and I find the same goes if you substitute Win with OS X or Linux or whatever.

Also; when you write software, now or in the 80s, late 70s (before that it was a bit harder unless it was Cobol/Fortran or something), you separate the frontend from the backend. I wrote a ton of 'Windows only' (meaning it had to only run on Windows) software for companies in the 90s and 90+% of that C++ or Delphi code compiles fine on Win + Mac + Linux. I will still say it's about balls in choosing your tech if it's not mainstream aka simply blabbering out: Oracle + MS, but more so now; now there isn't much excuse for picking lock-in tech for the most part.

Not sure what the 3-month old kernel is about; those exist in MS/Apple/... as well; who runs prod on that? So what does that even mean?
Ask HN: What questions should I ask when considering a remote position?
I'm considering leaving a $BigTechCo to start working remotely for a well funded but still small startup in a technical role (DevOpsy stuff). They do already have a few remote employee's.

What are some things I should be asking in regards to how to they work with/handle remote team members?

Are there any warning signs or red flags that I should keep an eye out for when meeting with them that might indicate working remotely would be problematic?
More like Samsung's split screen for loading links, difference being that this bubble thing does not open the view by default and does not let you resize it. It however available to all Androids where Samsung stuff only works in their UI.
That's very cool, but jeez is that really in line with the price of baked bread in San Francisco?
This morning, 3,50€ bought me half a kilo of 5-cereals focaccia, two loaves of cereal breada and half a kilo of white bread. That's bread for a eight people lunch. That's probably one of the few things I'm gonna miss about Italy when I'll leave.
And while you're on the way to Sao Paulo, mind stopping by in Tokyo? it's impossible to find decent bread here...
Exxon is in the top ten for revenue, that is not a good example on your part. also, $100k is not a large salary in my book. Doubling it is the sort of gamble I'm talking about.
It's touching that people want and have the means to help the Turks continue to communicate thanks to Tor. But it's too bad that running a Tor exit node, due to what Tor is so commonly used for by nature of anonymity, is such a glaring liability[1] to the operator -- and, due to how easily and commonly Tor exit nodes can be used nefariously, a liability to the users[2].

Hopefully uProxy, slated to be released this summer, will address these issues effectively by incorporating a trust model[3] into facilitating circumvention through such censorship walls. Meanwhile, more and more https[4] would be helpful.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator-char...
[2] http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled-onions.pdf
[3] https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa-with...
[4] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-...
Seen: From Idea to 72% Monthly Growth
Do you tip? or just the $5?
The answer to all three questions is no.
The actual link is here http://orre.neurologic.org/pubdoc/abstract/complex2003-abstr...
I love bread. I'd use this if I lived in SF.
my recollection is that he said QE would have limited effects

You're correct, he did say that back in 2008. See Amezarak's post in response to me upthread.

he says that, contrary to what you suggest, the whole point of QE is to cause inflation

I think he meant that the Fed thought it would cause inflation. But he has said a number of times that if the economy is in a "liquidity trap", printing more money will not cause inflation. (QE is one way of effectively printing more money.)
Not only do we go to meetups and conferences, we host them. At some point you may want to consider the possibility that I know what I'm talking about.
Carbon Fiber 3D Printer
You can use a write-once hardware register at the end of the boot sequence for similar effect.

But you can actually just leave the entire sector write only, even on boot. This is what most embedded Linux systems do - the entire rootfs is read only, /tmp and the like are on a ramdisk, and only a small writable partition remains for things like logs. In fact, Linksys routers didn't even have a writable filesystem - they stored all their settings on a separate EEPROM.
Yeah I didn't realize lower scores were better either. The lack of instructions is annoying.
I've heard somewhere that, until recently, in Myanmar sim cards were so expensive (couple grands each) that they were used as assets (like gold teeth, but more convenient to use).
I understand how textbooks can be expensive. It's simple supply and demand. Fewer people buy textbooks than other types of books, so they cost more.

That's where my empathy ends. It seems to me that there's a huge problem with unethical sales practices and underhanded tricks to reduce the used textbook market. This article's title should have been about the shady textbook companies rather than simply the prices of new books.
I think the 20 minute delivery is a big part of it.
Agreed in that engagement and motivation are big issues. But time and time again I've witnessed physicians rushing through explanations of a patient's condition and management in a language far too sophisticated for a layman's understanding. I know that nurses typically walk through discharge instructions with a patient, so maybe my perspective is one-sided. Although I do think physicians should have a bigger role in educating and motivating patients by providing them with a thorough understanding of their conditions and medications.
These guys just got a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. They let you rent textbooks for $5 a day. http://www.packbackbooks.com/

When I was in college, I figured out the textbook scheme by my second semester. We would buy expensive books and next semester the bookstore wouldn't buy them back because they were "outdated editions."

So every year after that, I never bought any textbooks. I would either find the professor's powerpoints online, or make a friend who did buy it and make copies of their book. If I absolutely needed a book I would rent it from Chegg or buy used off Amazon, but now Pack Back books looks like an even better solution.
Krugman is always pointing to Japan as an example

You're right; I had forgotten that he pointed out that QE didn't help Japan's loan market at all.

Krugman's attitude seems to have mostly been "if we can't have fiscal policy that would actually solve the problem, then I guess we'll have to hope that QE does something but I doubt it."

Yes, he often talks about "forward guidance" as his preferred method. I didn't mean to say he was in favor of QE in preference to other methods.

Personally, I'm as skeptical of "forward guidance" as I am of QE, mainly because the Fed has, for quite some time now, been trying to double-promise that it won't raise interest rates for a while even if the economy starts recovering. The problem is that nobody appears to believe them.
The Chinese hacking narrative seemed to stop entirely once the leaks started. The US were victims and China were villains. Suddenly...silence.
Haha, I'm based in NYC and actually spoke to your co-founder this past week at Blueprint!
I asked theperson i was replying to if he could be concrete. If you agree with him why dont you tell me why in a concrete way? Or tell me what are you trying to prove and how, and I may give you concrete info.
I bet half the audience sees this as an indictment of tuition increases, and the the other half sees this as an indictment of the lack of minimum wage increases.

I know what the author is trying to convey, but I'm not sure he has the best metric.
The new wave of anonymous social networks is neither new nor anonymous.
Seems like a good idea to me. I submitted my info but didn't hear back. Did anyone get a response?
It's seemingly not an uncommon pattern in electronics related hobbies, you'll have a few main forums with their own orthodoxy, and a banned former member who disagrees, and clearly has at least a good idea what they're talking about.

For instance, rc multirotors has "timecop", who was banned from rcgroups. He designed a flight controller which is popular and well thought of. AIUI, he also did the hardware design for what are probably the most recommended enthusiast motor controllers today.
My UK experience on a science course was that any mentioned books were highly optional and all course material was available for free on the internal network: lecture notes, slides and question sheets. Any reading material was only a suggestion, and available in the libraries anyway. Courses where you had to get books, e.g. history, the texts were in libraries. There was even a slight kerfuffle when the only way to get notes for one of the lecture courses was to buy their book, rather than giving them away as PDF as was normal. The idea of being forced to spend hundreds of £s on textbooks is crazy.
Can't wait to see this working as a plug-in for Atom (github's new text editor). Since Atom plugins are written like browser extensions (in javascript)...
Yep. aka "Hollywood accounting".
ShowHN: Read articles and blog posts in a cleaner, readable format
Here's something I made to make reading articles and blog posts easier by extracting the text from the original post and displaying the same content in a more readable format, removing all the necessary stuff. Calling it reedMe for now.

Sometimes we want to read something online (mostly on desktops), but we skip it because of the text not being readable or you find it boring.

Apps like Pocket and Instapaper solve this problem by letting you bookmark these and reading them later. They are super fine.

But,ReedMe makes the process faster, and let's you view pages in a simpler format by just appending reedme.in/ in the original URL.

http://reedme.in

--
I'll be adding more features to it, customization options.
I would love some feedback on this, and suggestions.
Thanks!
Simple audio enhacement
fart-enhanced video made easy
I believe they use Reed-Solomon encoding but as it is up to the memory controller to implement it can change. The memory just provides the extra bits for the software to use. In our fictional gun ownership example it would be like the owner hiding multiple guns around the house so that if one was compromised by an intruder they could still defend themselves. :-)
I think I do understand: the author either did not think this was going to be used on a tablet (after all, it teaches git in it's bare cli form, not by the aid of an point-and-click ui) - or just didn't care about it (for pretty much the same reason, or because he thought there aren't many people using git cli on a tablet anyway).
The whole time I looked, there was at least one person searching for "nekrofil" - I feel like I'm missing some context...
How Online Animal Rights Activists Helped Catch Luka Magnotta
Other discussion of the same post that's also on the front page, with more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452231

(Looks like HN doesn't canonicalize all the blogspot.tld URLs.)
Brake Bread in the Twin Cities area has something similar with its subscription service, delivered by bike.

http://brakebread.com/
Instapaper has the textize option (free to use, I think?). It's a bookmarklet

http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Freedme.in%2F
His metric is perfect for his purpose. "Here is how the time commitment required for working through college has changed over time. Your past experience many years ago is no longer relevant."

He wasn't saying what we should or should not do about it. Merely that working through college on standard college jobs is no longer a viable option.
Or just extort someone into forfeiting their property rights. "Here, sign over the rights to your property and I won't take you to jail."
Finally. But i'd prefer to get every day a fresh loaf @7am, and then you can really save on delivery costs. And give me a $2-3/per smaller bread (cuz u don't go through it in a day) if I subscribe like yearly.

I'll give it a shot though.
I can't imagine it's that much of a struggle to find good bread in Italy.
I guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely "hacker"-ish about this.

It's a bakery that delivers. That's great, I guess, but there's nothing particularly technical about it. They're not using tech in some unusual or interesting way to cut down on delivery costs, or make bread in a different way, or anything. It's just... a bakery, that delivers.

There's a Web form to order your bread through, but in 2014 that's not really any different than having a phone number to order your bread through used to be. (It looks like there's a mobile app to come, but if all it does is show you a menu and let you order it would fall roughly into the same category. Table stakes.)

I was talking with a relative of mine who's been in the grocery business for decades over the holidays last year, and we were joking around about how it wouldn't be long until someone started touting home milk delivery -- something that was commonplace before most homes had TV sets, or even radios, much less computers -- as a "tech startup." This isn't that, of course. But it's close.
Pages on iCloud
Just picked it up (two people in a black Prius :)

They seemed swamped (they were 10 minutes late and were visibly frazzled) but upbeat. Bread was decent.

I suspect that if you go into pastries, you probably can command a higher margin (I really dislike keeping desserts in the apartment, and "dessert on demand" definitely would be appealing)
With Linux no one can pull the plug. Here, they are at MS's mercy. So they learned their mistake the hard way.

Naturally, even supported versions of Linux like RedHat's and etc. have an EOL date support wise. But in the worst case if some company is stubborn enough to stay on the old version for whatever reason (which might be valid for them), they can take the code and support it themselves. With Windows it's not possible. So open systems have a clear advantage here.
Seven Surprising Growth Hacking Stats
Wearable Technology/Rule of 72's
Microsoft has 15-16 billion dollar businesses[1]. The realm of mistakes that might sink Red Hat is quite a bit different than the realm of mistakes that would sink Microsoft.

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-businesses...
After about a year into undergrad through an online program I've been pleased to find that most of my classes have used affordable books affordable, mass-market sources.

In one case I simply opted for an alternative course rather than pay $148.00 for the textbook.

At the same time I've been doing ID Verified courses on edX. edX courses and materials are a fraction of the cost with vastly superior interfaces for everything.

Rather than just fixing the cost of materials at traditional Universities I hope to see the whole racket of higher education broken by the MOOCs.
These organizations seem almost organic, an emergent phenomenon that protects it's own existence. How does one kill a bureaucracy? It's times like these I'm tempted to throw my support behind the "Eric Schmidt for CEO of America" stunt.
I had a well-paying software internship for most of my time in college, and still left college with ~$30k of debt. Even while making $600/week, it wasn't possible to manage living expenses and tuition payments without taking loans.
> Proprioception

Interesting, Need to do some more research on this.
Also, if the browser concept was patented, how could someone else innovate over browsers, if theres a need to pay for the privilege of being inventive?
Its entirely possible at a community college to pay more for books than tuition.
Nicely executed. The choice of giving one [configurable] app for free and all apps for $5 is also an interesting business model.
I think PCA is better understood in theorem-proof style of mathematics rather than algorithmically. For example, PCA can be understood as an optimization problem. Whereas CART and k-NN and the likes are best understood algorithmically. I know k-NN was introduced as an algorithm and only later figured out in terms of probability, etc..
Spotted as early as 2001.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/macos-x-server/2001/Jun/msg0...
This Chart Perfectly Captures The Utter Insanity Of The Dotcom Bubble
Experiments have been done, and have shown good results. I've no objection to further experimentation, but at some point we should implement the policy that looks best. There is, mathematically speaking, clearly some non-empty set of optimal values for a Basic Income. How confident are you that $0 is in that set, even in the face of argument (from not just the modern left, but also Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman and some modern Libertarians) and experiment?
Typing in instapaper.com/?text?u= seems tedious. Still, thanks!
NSA hacked into servers at Huawei headquarters, reports say
This is a war #go2048#
A global leader board for 2048 game with replay.
Design Flaw in Skillshare
They're applying for YC though, so they're validating an idea. Gotta appreciate that they're learning what it means to deliver bread on demand. If I lived in SF, I'd have them bring me a loaf of bread today.
Thanks to the Cottage Food Act, as of 2013 it's super-easy if you're relatively low volume. It's a self-inspection (as in, "follow this checklist") and a cheap registration so they can track you down if you cause some kind of outbreak.

See: https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as
In ye-olden-UNIX-days it was possible to open an xterm in 'console mode' where system type messages would get reported. How do you do this in linux and how come that feature is no longer desired?
As someone who took both humanities and engineering courses during undergrad, the textbook $$$ bloat problem was in my opinion MUCH more pronounced in the sciences and maths (or even courses like economics). Humanities courses tend not to even use textbooks (in my experience), just many single books that a crafty student could get from the library instead of buying, and weren't outrageously priced.
IIRC, it was made specifically for us and the startups in San Fran.
When I was doing professional web cartoons in Flash in 2000, Macromedia's general response to our complaints like "The editor falls over and dies on big files" was "it's not for that, it's for making little interactive thingies".

Fast forward a few years and there are network TV cartoons being done with Flash. Though it's a hell of a lot easier when you can render out video and stick it together instead of trying to put everything into one SWF for delivery over a 19.2k modem.
I clicked through to read about how they plan on running it long term. They will carry a very limited number of products, and every delivery person has all the products stocked in their van. They then route the nearest delivery person to you when you order, so it's kind of like a mobile coffee shop.

I don't know if it is possible to make it profitable, but it is definitely a service I would use. It is a pain keeping bread on hand because the good stuff only keeps for a day or two.
Instructions to Insight meditation
Sure thing. I should have mentioned that you don't need to read the whole thing (Searle's Chinese room argument is dicussed in only one section of the linked lecture).

You'll probably enjoy his other material. Scott Aaronson is a prolific expositor, he's been blogging for nearly a decade (since before he was hired by MIT's CS dept).
Which, btw, isn't this what Gmail has done since it's inception? I remember reading it plainly stated in the 1st paragraph of their EULA when it was beginning the long beta run, I appreciated their candor & also opted not* to use such a service. I assumed all free emails hid the same clause in varying depth inside their EULAs. Did we learn nothing from Excite@Home?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite.com#Excite.40Home

EDIT: *I had hotmail & excite accounts before the mergers and I retained them for years after for online catch-all accounts.
My 17yo hotmail locked me out when I refused to give MS my phone number awhile back. meh.
Ah, I thought SUSE was split off into its own company back when they acquired Novell.
Fastmail is really good! I fell in love with it since reading https://github.com/duncan-bayne/duncan-bayne.github.com/wiki...
Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not To Hire Apple Workers
>I bet half the audience sees this as an indictment of tuition increases, and the the other half sees this as an indictment of the lack of minimum wage increases.

There's a group who sees this as an indictment of the excessive student loans propping up the college bubble.
> I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published

It's easy: the information would have been available (the book, the article by Der Spiegel) no matter what the actions of the NYT had been, see my other comment here.

I consider it definitely newsworthy.