skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's a shame that the blogger provided inadequate summary of the article. at the same time, i found this very upsetting:

"This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health."

the assumption that every american adult has complete control over his life is false. i don't even believe that this is approximately true -- especially when health care is the issue at hand.
1) A browser's full JS implementation is pretty closely coupled with its rendering engine. Even Mozilla ties them together, and they have a long heritage of making chunks of browser functionality separate libraries for no goddamn reason.

2) In the real world open source software is about scratching your own itch, and has absolutely nothing to do with "what's best for users". Developers are highly invested in their own code, and are loath to rip it out and replace it with someone else's. It's extraordinarily rare for OSS projects to merge at all even when they are forks (and I can't think of a single example of non-forked projects merging).
hah... i'm ready for an anecdote deathmatch...

I do acknowledge that Whole Foods had great produce and offers a lot of healthy food that isn't sold at most grocery stores... but I suspect that Whole Foods' growth has been fueled by selling expensive junk food to the same people who would never have shopped at Whole Foods when it smelled like body odor inside.
His numbers don't make a lot of sense to me. As I read it, there's a $2500 deductible and Whole Foods contributes $1800/yr to an account their employees can use to pay for care. This basically equates to a $700 deductible, no?
Obama's War and How to Win It (10 Rules for 5th Gen Warfare)
Ask HN: Has Anyone Tried Kava Extract?
Hey all! Recently I was told that Kava extract can have a relaxing effect without diminishing cognitive abilities. I have been doing some research but was curious if any of the HN members have tried it.
I fail to see how this analogy is valid.
Burning Man Responds to EFF criticism over digital photography rights
Please expound. Why is it false?
Event/ Book Review:  "The Daemon"  British consciousness theorist Anthony Peake
Sure, email me and I'll send you some. It works and the FDA grants it Generally Recognized as Safe status. The effects don't last very long, maybe 2-3 hours. It is not physically addictive. You can buy it at Whole Foods but it is about 25% the cost online.

I also sell another substance, mitragyna speciosa, that may work for you depending on your situation. Email is in the profile. The other thing you could do is ask a mental health professional! Kava will relax you, but it's a bad idea to use it to treat an anxiety disorder.
Does a national health care plan make people more likely to start a company?
Some years ago I had an idea for a startup but didn't want to go without health insurance. I have a good job and I felt the risk of getting sick or injured without health care insurance outweighed the likely gains from starting a company.
This seems so obvious and yet something I hadn't thought about until I read the article.
I've only been a programmer by trade for a couple years so I don't know very much yet, but could someone please enlighten me: what does the platform have to do with how difficult a problem is? I thought platforms, languages, etc. were just tools, and the web or desktop are just user environments; how do these tools and environments determine how complex the problems are? Apps can be as trivial as you want them to be or as difficult as you want them to be, regardless of how they are accessed. At least that's what I thought, or am I making some naive newbie mistake here?

Also it just seems like a lot of these anti-web "real" programmers don't ever discuss much about user interface design, as if that's trivial and backend programming is "real" programming because it's ugly and normal people get confused by it. Kind of reminds me of jr. high school when our school had apple computers, but the myself and other kids who owned PCs thought we were way smarter than apple users, because somehow we thought that typing in a black shell window makes you smarter than someone who draws pictures with a mouse.
Two points.

Firstly and most importantly thank you for keeping such a high standard of discourse. It's appreciated.

Secondly, many of Mackey's points are sound policy: health insurance should be universally deductable (or not) and HSAs may or may not be very effective.

However, others are disingenuous; all healthcare is rationed, in the US it's rationed by ability to pay whereas in Canada and the UK it's rationed by medical severity; food and shelter are already commonly provided by governments; the existence of faceless bureaucracies limiting care in traditional health insurance agencies and last but not least the Constitution's explicit disclaimer being treated as an exclusive list of rights to be guaranteed.

Most crucially in my view it entirely ignores the issue of insurers' ability to redefine their risk pools. What protection does Mackey's plan offer someone with a preexisting condition? Someone who develops a chronic and expensive condition? Someone who becomes unemployed? These are severely problematic use cases in the current system.
Even if it is false, how does that assumption relate to Mackey's statement?

Control and responsibility are two different things - there are plenty of things we have no control over, but does that mean we shouldn't be responsible for ourselves?
Can you not check for yourself. Is your only method of retrieving information people on hacker news?
What is so "right-wing" about Mackey's rhetoric? Is it assumed because he is a CEO? From what I'm reading, there's nothing much "right-wing" about it.

How is allowing consumers to purchase insurance across state lines right-wing? I can make the same argument for having an abortion instead of purchasing insurance.

Equalizing tax benefits for employer and individually purchased insurance? Who argues against that?

Price transparency? Tort reform? Tax deductible donations to the uninsured? Are you sure liberals are objecting to this?

Medicare reform is a pretty general statement.

The only position that can be considered "right-wing" is repeal government mandates for types of coverage.

Like the Congressmen that hasn't read their own bills, I have a feeling most boycotters haven't read the actual article. In this authors case, he seemed to skipped the most important part.
No need to send but the offer is much appreciated (they sell tea at the local health food store). How would you describe the effects? I have been looking for healthy relaxant to use while coding (and trying to avoid teas and coffee late night).
This was better than I expected.
I never thought the argument was that organic food is more beneficial nutritionally. I thought it is supposed to be less harmful overall. This is an important distinction.
Yeah. It's the same way with auto insurance and warranties. The dealer covers the costs of any catastrophic maintainence for the first few years, so the consumer tends to skip out on routine maintainence like oil changes. And at those regular tune-ups, when the mechanics appraise someone of a developing problem, they tend to avoid preventative maintainence, saying, "Nah, I'll just let it fail so the warranty handles it."

. . . ;)

My theory is that the inconvenience of a major failure and the risk to life and limb are much more important to most folks than the tiny costs associated with regular and preventative maintainence. I know they're more important to me!

It's actually been rigorously shown to work the same way with medicine. There was a study on HSA / High Deductable plans already in use, and it found that use of preventative care actually increased compared to the baseline.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08...
But it is more tasty.
Actually, I agree with your disagreement :)

It's simply not possible for Chicagoans (is that the word?) to test all their ideas. There are plenty of theories for which no real-world data exists, so they must remain as speculation for now.

And I'm extremely sympathetic to the Austrian ideas. I love Mises' Human Action (at least the parts of it I've been able to get through so far). At the same time, I must acknowledge that the deeper one goes into such reasoning, the greater the chance for failing to notice that you made an assumption, one that may be wrong. So there's a necessity to get back to a touchstone of the real world occasionally.

It may not seem so, but it's easy for pure logic to go astray. Mathematicians pride themselves on logical rigor, but the fact is that many modern-day mathematical proofs are so complex that no one is really sure that they're correct.

And I'm dismayed that the Keynesians have been crowing about multipliers of late, when all of our experience during the 70s has shown us fundamental flaws in the Keynesian philosophy (yes, you can easily have high inflation and high employment at the same time!).
Some interesting convo.

Though do we not all check Google ANalytics re: where traffic is coming from? When I see a traffic spike I immediately review the sites traffic is coming from and the number of visitors each one sent. Would think everyone does this too...
They are pretty high in Computer Science too. US News ranking for 2008 (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...) places them at the 9th place, shared with UT Austin.
So long as the kids learn their three Rs, why is it anyone's business but theirs and their parents' what else they learn? Or how they get it done?

Seems to me designing laws allowing some to discourage access to theological/scientific/ideological education that others may desire is the unjust approach.
> "The Soil Association’s response, published in papers across the land, entirely disregarded the intent of the study and instead argued that organic food is better for the environment and contains less pesticides than non-organic food. But in the very first paragraph of the report, the team states that they aren’t looking at the impact on the environment of organic agriculture or the effect of pesticide use, both of which the FSA has extensively examined in other research."

> "The FSA study is good science and by attacking, rather than endorsing it, the organic lobby in the UK has been plainly unscientific."

true, but the SA's response is an excellent marketing response. ple think what they're told, and if no one outright makes the claim about the environmental impact, then people will conclude, oh, it's already to eat non-organic.
Living in the UK I can say it is a big bonus having to not worry about healthcare in any aspect of life: because you know if something goes wrong your guaranteed care.

With that said it isn't FREE: there are taxes and so forth though I believe private US health insurance (like you would be purchasing) is anything from 2-5 times more expensive (my NI contribution on a £33K salary is £130 a month - of which a percentage goes to healthcare - I estimate around £80).

However one big advantage IMO is that the National Insurance Tax is recovered in a standard way by the tax man and there is no tiers or anything - it just covers everything - meaning less stress finding a good deal and ensuring you have adequate deals (I know just ensuring my car is a pain in the bum :) I cant imagine medical!)

The crux being: I dont think it's quite possible to claim it would encourage more startups. But I suspect it would remove another hurdle from any other prospective startups.
Startup school application open for business
I'd add autopager & firegestures to that. I doubt I'll ever use a different browser.
You guys are pretty fast. I managed to get the newly rewritten application form onto the server this morning, but then I was busy all day talking to startups about their Demo Day presentations. I'm going to try to get the startupschool.org site updated this evening.
Fun finally putting a face to your nick :) At the start of your talk you talked a little bit about reviews and even mention a few things such as how many companies only send emails or that you can work in a branch without having to push it to the central repository. This is one area of Git and distributed revision control that I can't praise enough. It raises the code review bar to a whole new level while making it less work. The best example was how with svn/perforce etc when reviewing patches almost no one ever applied the patch to see if it even compiled let alone worked. With Git I nearly always do this because it is so easy. This an other things really improve the quality of the main repository on a day to day basis.
I like Varian's discussion of this pair of anecdotes he thinks of in answer to a question:

"Q: Is innovation in the Valley as high as it was 10 years ago?"

"Varian: I'll tell you an angle that I think is different from 10 years ago, and that's what I call the micro-multinational.

"One day I bumped into a friend of mine, and asked what she was up to. She said, I've got a company. And I said tell me about it, and she said there are 12 people, three in New Delhi, two in Mountain View, and there's somebody in Spain.

"And then two days later I ran into another guy, and he said I've got a company, and there are four people in Italy, two people in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and three in San Francisco. And I said, whoa, what is this? A trend! It's two of them!"

He goes on to discuss why this trend is happening and what it may mean for the Valley.
The analogy to fire departments doesn't work. Your fire insurance doesn't pay the fire department to save your house, it pays you to repair/replace it. That one's free market all the way.

Furthermore, there are many free markets in which consumers cannot be fully informed which work just fine. I know very little about the design of video cards, the maintainence of automobiles, how to remodel a house, what makes a good lawyer, whether my glasses are good for my vision, or myriad other things I pay others for on a regular basis. Nonetheless, I am able to navigate these markets just fine and make tradeoffs according to my personal values. The combined effect of consumer reports, public opinion, and paid personal advocates seems to get me there okay.

I submit that in a free market, most would have no more difficulty shopping for a docter than they do for a mechanic.

And while patients cannot choose when or how to fall ill, they can choose what to treat, what to treat well, what to invest in preventing, and what to simply tough out. The dire necessity of my owning a car does not prevent competition between car dealerships.
It's the only "intoxicant" I will use.

I import it from here http://www.realkava.com/

It's the good Sh

And instead of filtering it.. I take a heaping tablespoon, mix it with some water and shot it.. then eat something immediately after as chaser to kill the taste.

If you do anymore shots other than one every 3 or so hours it will probably make your stomach sick - I had to figure that out the hard way.

Happy kava-ing!
I mean I buy it from there.. I said import .. I live in California and Hawaii "feels" like another country.. :)

I also got mixed up with the Kava extract I imported from China before - which was crap.
Ask HN: Has anyone tried {any of a wide variety of drugs}? I was told that {any of a wide variety of drugs} has the following effects...
I am sick of people selling/advertising drugs on HN.

EDIT: Removed the "flagged" bit. Explicitly mentioning it here as an acknowledgement that it was a violation of the guidelines to mention flagging explicitly.
When is it?
October 24, in Berkeley.
One of my favorite secret tools: http://www.changedetection.com/ let's you track pages, and emails you once they change. Not sure what their revenue model is, but it's let me get in first on many occasions. Very handy.
Apple Plans Two Tablets. One has a webcam.
The Fast Ways to Lose Weight
a "play" button to press doesn't hint at a game at all, it hints at a movie. you press "play" to play a movie, you press "Start" to start a game. You may argue that those terms can be easily reversed, which may at first glance be a sound argument, but deeper investigation would reveal that you do not play many video games, or have possibly never owned a VCR. This isn't an argument of grammar, this is an argument of tradition, and traditionally we say: ↑↑↓↓←→ ←→ A B SELECT START

just saying, not hating >_>
Indeed. We still don't understand enough about food to say that organic food is not better. If you stopped eating real food and only ate lard, soy protein, cardboard, and a vitamin pill, you would probably not do too well. But that is all we use to understand the nutritional value of food. (Vitamins, minerals, fat, carbohydrates, and protein.)

(Admittedly the American food system is getting close to this. Corn is soooo good for you(r wallet), after all.)
I've used the Tree Style Tabs on Firefox, and I can say that I actually prefer the way Chrome does it. With Chrome, it looks like a standard list of tabs, but behind the scenes, it's a tree.

To each their own...
One train of thought seems notably absent in this discussion:

The skill a good school attempts to teach has very little to do with any particular language. Instead they are seeking to teach you the one skill "to rule them all":

To learn how to learn, how to acquire new skills, how to analyze, how to synthesize and how to think systematically;

or said another way

the ability to identify and understand the problem space, to identify a tool that fits the problem well (even though you've perhaps never used it before), to acquire that tool quickly, and to wield it powerfully.

Consider that in your typical engineering degree, the half-life of your direct knowledge is but a few years -- half of what you "know" is obsolete within years. At the same time schools do want you to be "rapidly productive" in something that sees relatively wide use, or the job market gives them hell, and there just isn't enough time to cover all possible principles from all scenarios.

So they can but strive to stimulate your intellect and pique your curiosity so that you will naturally want to be aware of the possibilities and be open minded to all the various tools out there; and that you will have some framework available to you to understand what you will come across.
If he's using PayPal's micropayments pricing (Fees = $0.05 + 5%), he's made just shy of $12,000 on the site so far.

I can't decide what I think about that number, except that I expect it goes farther in Romania.
Don't worry, most of us get over it and eventually start talking like normal people again. Even when we're talking about art.
Any speakers announced yet?
We don't even fully understand the elements and combinations of substances that make up 'nutritious'. So the claims of the author that 'Organic Food Isn't More Nutritious' are demonstrably an overstatement.

It's funny how the author can exaggerate the studies findings like this while showing such disdain for others who respond to his exaggerated conclusion rather than address the studies findings directly. The study has some good information but I'd prefer to hear it from an author that wasn't so partisan to a particular view.
If you're going to be sensitive about being called a troll, you should stop acting like one.

It would have taken you 30 seconds to click the 'About Us' link at the top of the page and learn that Sunlight Labs is "an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable." Instead, you chose to come up with an insane conspiracy theory.
"Pointless babble" like this poor excuse for an article, I suppose. What some friends might find interesting from me is useless to others. Does that make it pointless? No.
Sweet, I have a free plane ticket I've been saving for Startup School (I gave my seat up and got a voucher). Berkeley will be a good venue too.
Not So Easy To Make It In China
The controls were mentioned in the opening screen itself.
One of the wonderful things about being a small business on the Internet is that there are several favors (SEO considerations, viral marketing, word of mouth, network effects) which make double-digit YoY growth practically a given. (You are more or less incapable of saturating your market, something that larger businesses have to worry about -- what does Facebook do after signing up nearly every American who uses a computer regularly?)

If you keep at it, the miracle of compound interest will do all the rest.

Compare that to a more traditional day job, which typically gives you a higher starting salary and then increases at 2 to 4% a year, with SHARPLY limited options for ever getting out of that bracket no matter how good your performance is.
StumbleUpon WebToolbar - The World's Extremes | Scienceray
I'm not aware of any quantitative research which shows that, though it is a popular opinion in California, regardless.

Edit: Thanks, down-modders. Real mature. You know what you call beliefs without evidence? Religion.

How about pointing out some evidence if you disagree with me?
The thing is, we arleady wait months for new releases, what's another 30 days? Are we really that pathetic?
Try building something which provides value even if you're the only person using it. (I have always admired Delicious for this. If every other person on it died tomorrow it would still be an excellent bookmark manager.) Then you don't need "traction", you just need more customers tomorrow than you have today. Repeat times a few hundred.
I got health insurance through mediabistro.com
create a paid social news site like described above?
> Why is everybody crowded in the web space?

What did you expect to find on the web if not the web itself?

People in hordes flock to latest web 2.0 place for another doze of ferret shock. That alas is just a nature.
I think the idea is to charge for filtering, not for content.
The diminishing returns on data
Why? The two projects have been swapping the performance lead back and forth since the start of this current period of insane browser development, and it would be an enormous undertaking to make the switch.
Hate to say it but Cubespace is dead. http://cubespacepdx.com/node/2015
I think the point is less about competitive advantages, and more that time is never irrelevant. What you want to maximize is, as it were, the area under the curve on the time-value graph. That means delivering a reasonable amount of value as soon as you can is going to be a better strategy than delivering no value for a longer time while you try to perfect things, then eventually delivering more value.

And since it's always a moving target, getting something that works "well enough" and then moving on to the next thing will always keep you ahead of people polishing their gleaming cube of perfection for ever more marginal returns.
Data Visualization Blog
"Fortunately nobody listens to Dave Winer"

Thankfully that's been true most of the time -- a world in which anyone but him used Frontier is not one in which I want to live. But a few of his clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, his epic mismanagement of RSS (which only ended with a headshot from Atom).

The man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for him, the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft and IBM would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have pretended it had anything to do with the web.