skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here, actual proof - from an MIT economist - that health care is hurting entrepreneurship. Money quote:

"Americans who have an alternative source of health insurance, such as a spouse’s coverage, are much more likely to be self-employed than those who don’t. Wellington estimates that universal health care would therefore likely increase the share of workers who are self-employed (currently about 10 percent of the workforce) by another 2 percent or more."
Agreed. But I also think that what people tweet about is worthless mostly when there is nothing to tweet about. :-)
This (trendsmap) might make a lot more sense in crisis situations. We might be able to see relevant tweets coming out from affected areas. Just a thought.
I've never come across a keypad lock that would be vulnerable to this. You either have to press # at the end of the code, or the codes are significantly longer than 4 digits. Of course, even in the first category, entering 24 codes (50% chance of entering 12 or fewer) isn't a huge barrier once you know the four digits.
"But mainly, I dis-like the first impression it gives of me to anyone in this community. No, I'm not just some guy who can make websites. In fact, I have two BS degrees in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and graduated top of my class for each. And I now own a successful consultancy and startup. I think I deserve a little more credibility than my naively-chosen username allows."

If you where deserving of some random amount of credibility you just lopped that figure off at the knees with this paragraph.

Equally unimpressive is your unwillingness to display a modicum of adaptability in the face of an utterly trivial matter. Instead you've opted to post a rant.
actually, the current EB-5 structure is perhaps subject to the "elite" criticism, but our proposal is exactly the opposite.

if changed as we suggest -- so that any entrepreneur talented enough to attract funding can get the visa, not just the investor -- then it's actually anti-elitist, and in fact democratizes access.
"(If anything, his later-stage investors were not thrilled that he was selling so quickly; they would have preferred a much larger, later exit, given Mint's long-term potential.)"

Pretty sure I said exactly that here. Seemed fairly obvious that either it was a fire sale or some VCs would have preferred going for more.

Probably what I'd not considered is that no VC wants to be in the position of blocking an exit of a company still run by the founders.
VC rounds vary widely. If you forced me to guess I'd say 10-15%, but there's definitely know way to know for sure without insider info.
Blech! I'd rather stare at cockroaches. IfYaKnowWhatIMeanAndImPrettySureThatYouDoItWasADarkAndStormyNight
I remember they had an explanation about this, but I don't remember what it was, and it seems to have disappeared: what are these 50,000 computers they're using?
Pricey!

I'd pimp for Open Google instead.
Try Yahoo Pipes for things like that?
Microsoft’s Tablet PC Prototype In Action
This seems to me to be self-evident. Before we got (expensive) group health insurance, we lost a large portion of our most promising candidates over health insurance concerns.

I say this on HN constantly because it bears repeating: if you want to understand the problem with the current health insurance system, assume that a normal family of four cannot get private health care coverage at any reasonable price, or in some locales at all. It doesn't matter how much extra you pay your employees. There are many reasons, a bunch of which devolve to "we don't want to cover women with functioning uteruses", why a typical family cannot get covered outside the group coverage system.
My preference would be blogs as a primary means of disseminating information.
Anonymous's video proclaiming their intent is truly epic. It's interesting to note the lack of coherence and describable goals in cruise's video when compared to the Anonymous video.

There's a Scientology church near where I live, and every time I see Anonymous members outside it I make it a point to stop and tell them that I think they're doing a good job...

I always take heart when I see people standing up against something they think is wrong, regardless of their effectiveness.
Tips for the First-Time Business Owner
Why would you need Google to index your blog that same day if no other blogs want to talk about it?
3 years late ;-)

http://dogbiscuit.org/mdub/weblog/Tech/Programming/Ruby/Meth...

This is one reason I like Ruby so much though. Replaying recorded messages is how I use syntax like "asm.mov [EAX * ECX + base], 0xdeadbeef" in my x86 assembler library (or DSL if you're trendy).
We also created the Internet much more than the rest of the world.	n'est-ce pas?
I wonder how they arrived at their $2 per million pricing model. Why not $10 per million? Either one sounds ridiculously inexpensive.
The Last Has Fallen. The Embargo Is Dead.
So you're saying a glut of childcare workers is responsible for lowering the cost of childcare wrt petcare. I think that's unlikely. It's more that sectors of society value pets above children, they pay more for the care of pets - the same way that people leave millions for the care of pets and ignore the plight of poverty stricken humans.
Great news since I have been relying on the previous LTS releases.

Just curious, are there any other linux distributions with long term support?
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to create an extremely fast, scalable architecture for crawling web sites. Took me a few months, anyway (and would probably take a few more to make it "fill in a web form and go" usable). After that, the processing is pretty straight forward.

You've got a URL, headers, and body content. Just extract what you want and crunch.
That reminds me about my fools day joke about MassiveClouding. I imagined about a company buying cpu/hours from regular desktop computer users and selling it to anyone interested in this kind of cpu power. Of course any computer software could be run on the MassiveClouding without any changes. My good imagination :) I don't know about the technology behind 80Legs but these 50000 computers might be a bot net.
from my own testing, it seems that people will sometimes say "that does not feel right", and when i switch it over to the other, they go "ah, that is better". just my own experience, which is why i find this so interesting
They're probably using EC2s and then it's a function of how many pages can be scrapped per EC2 compute hour and then taking a premium on top of that.

The reason why they didn't want it to be too expensive (ie. 5 times as expensive) is (1) competitors can easily equilibrate and steal market share if their idea works b/c of the economic inefficiencies in their pricing model and (2) this game plan is more a game of dependence rather than up front profits, so it makes sense to take very little profit up front to get user traction.
why not?

because its a non-trivial feature to build, and it would be likely that you would be the only person to ever use it in a manner that is not attempting to abuse the system in some form.

80/20 principle.
Larry Ellison Is Wrong on the Cloud
2 comments about that: First, it must be well defined in order for the operating system to be able to do something about the process. It may not be consistent, predictable to userspace, or runnable, but it must be something possibly sensible. Therefore, it doesn't matter, the debugger can still inspect it, and the programmer can make sense of this state.

Second, the debugger generally catches the signal before it gets handled.
This is only a good point if you assume that the current proposals magically provide free health care to you when you quit your job.

"Universal coverage" as currently being debated just mandates that you purchase coverages and penalizes you with a tax if you don't; even with a "public option" you still have to pay for said option.

If you want to argue that tax-supported single-payer systems give you more freedom to quit your job and start a startup, fine, but nothing currently proposed in the US does that.
Plura has a java applet which you can embed into a webpage that gets viewed for a long duration, such as a game or a streaming video.
Affiliates embed an iframe which loads their applet as the user plays their game. The user's CPU goes up a bit, and they can help generate revenue for the game makers.
Read this yesterday. A great profile piece by the NYT on an obscure but awesome story.
Tom Perkins Buys A Palace In The Sky
Pearl provides a formalism for expressing causality, however it's questionable (to me) whether that formalism corresponds to what we humans consider "causality". Take 3 variables as an example, A,B,C. We observe some instances of A,B,C triples, and try to fit a probability distribution P(A,B,C) to data. If A,B,C are binary, there are 7 parameters, we can fit them directly to training data to get perfect fit, however, when we run it on separate set (validation data), it'll probably not perform very well. To improve fit on new data, you need to reduce number of parameters, so you could make some simplifying assumptions and write P(A,B,C) as P(A)P(B|A)P(C|B). In this form, there are 5 parameters to fit, and the resulting model could perform better with validation data. Alternatively you could fit P(A)P(B)P(C|A,B), 6 parameters, or P(C)(B|C)P(A|B). Select the one that performs the best on your validation data, and is hence the "best" model.

Now comes the cuasality connection -- if the best model is P(A)P(B)P(C|A,B) you read it as A->C<-B. If best model is P(A)P(B|A)P(C|B), you read it as A->B->C. (ie, A causes B, B causes C)

I think causality connection is questionable because the model that corresponds to A->B->C will have the same fit as model for A<-B<-C or A<-B->C. In fact, you could take any causal network without loops and "unshielded colliders" (connections of the form A->B<-C), pick any node as a root, and re-order the arrows to face away from the root to get a model with a different semantic causal structure, but the same mathematical structure, meaning it'll give identical fit to data.

What would be really interesting is if someone deduced causality using Pearl's approach, then verified it using a direct experiment
I want to say that a bunch of cars had this. Even worse each button did 2 numbers so rather then 10 numbers there was actually only 5.
I hate stuff like this. The article is about generalizations made from a group of people. If you apply that to a single person (to "catch a liar"), you will only sometimes be correct. Catching a liar is something that you should only do when you know you are correct, and all lie detection schemes cannot do that. Sort of like our system of justice which would rather a guilty person go free that convict an innocent person. Well, in theory at least.
No one encouraged me. Period.
You obviously have not experienced how bad the situation is. For many people it is literally impossible to get health care coverage if their job does not provide it.

The difference between paying $0 and $200/month (especially when the first option is tax-subsidized) is trivial compared to the current situation where any "insurance" individuals are graced with being allowed to purchase can be revoked arbitrarily.

So, please, get your facts straight.
Hackers don't have a health? ;-) They surely have Acne though.
I'm actually surprised its not explained on the site (or if it is I can't find it).

If you're going to make a claim of 50,000 computers I'd want to see what you mean by that somewhere.
Has China had a green ‘Damascene conversion’?
An even more sinister approach would be to use an infrared meter a couple of seconds after someone just touched the keypad.
I have experienced it, because I quit my job and got my own health coverage to work as a freelancer.

If you think that $200 a month is what mandated insurance will cost a family of 4 who aren't Medicaid-poor, I don't know what to tell you.
They're targeting desktop apps. The Java app downloads the pages, so it needs high permissions, so you get the default Java unfriendly popup asking you for confirmation.
You believe incorrectly. Borland C++ IDE supported reverse execution back in early 90s.
What about a "matrix-like reality" would preclude science?

(It's actually a deep question, if you take the time to really grapple with it.)
Hmmmmm. Dennis rodman was playing for the San Antonio Spurs when he painted his hair and became famous. When he moved to the lakers he was already famous (or notorious). You could say that it is an unimportant mistake, but it seems rather silly, considering they actually have pictures of rodman in a san antonio spurs uniform illustrating their point about how he played for the lakers.
Curious, could you please share how you are covered and the cost? COBRA, Freelancer's Union, something else?
Back in my student days for DOS-based labs we just did

char foo[640*1024];
int main(int argc, char ** argv) { return 0; }

When ran, it made the OS say "Out of memory" and then it was lab assistant's headache to unload all that resident stuff that was sitting there and eating good 20-30% of available RAM. They typically opposed to doing that, so the TAs assumed the program actually worked. The end :)
Probably around 10%. Which isn't bad at all.

If he negotiated really well his early round, it could be 15%.

Also, keep in mind that if he owns 10%, it doesn't mean he got $17M (10% of $170M). VCs who invested money may have preference rights. For instance, if they put $20M in Mint, they could take the $20M out of the purchase price. Then, there is only $150M to share, and that's what Aaron would get 10% of.

Either way, he's fine :-)
No one knows if your name represents you though - I could be "redbloodedmale17" and still be a 40 year old woman. I thought dandelany was from "dandelion", possibly feminine, even if it is Dan Delaney then Dan could be for Danielle (f), Daniel (m), Danika (f), Dante (m), ... on the internetz know one knows your a dog.

Woof!
They do!

I used to work for a very small NASDAQ-traded company headed by a bunch of scumbags. Actually, just one scumbag: as far as I could tell the rest of them only stuck around because they wanted their investment back. A few years after I left, I found out that the company was being sued by the SEC, and specific officers and family members were ordered to disgorge illegally retained profits. SEC even ordered that the accounting firm that produced the annual/quarterly reports be prohibited from ever representing a public corporation again!

I laughed my ass off for days!!!

It may be rare, but in extreme cases of fraud, they will investigate and prosecute. I just wish I knew who among their pissed-off shareholders pulled enough strings to make it happen.
Ever since I saw Omniscient Debugger (ODB), I've wanted this feature integrated into my IDE. ODB was interesting but didn't seem to take off. I'm glad GDB is raising the debugger bar.

http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/
If it was $1200 a month with guaranteed-issue, that would at least be something a family could budget for. But it's not, right now. It's $1200 except your wife can't get coverage at all despite no major medical problems, or your daughter is excluded from virtually all care because of a hospital visit years ago.

Financially-savvy young entrepreneurs with families would obviously be better off with high-deductable plans and HSAs, which cost significantly less than $1200/year. But again, they can't do that, because private health insurance isn't guaranteed-issue.
Zappa came to mind largely because I'm still not happy with how he's treated by the music media. Here's a guy who changed the face of rock, inspired the greatest band of all time as much as the Beach Boys did (though they get mention), and was a huge figure both in jazz and modern classical music, possibly the best guitar soloist of all time, and makes a label that launches the likes of Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits, and he only gets mention as a "freak" outsider by most sources. The outsider culture in music infuriates me, because the most cutting-edge musicians get less than lip service almost everywhere. Trying to find the cutting edge is still ridiculously hard today: Looking for new music, I have a damned hard time doing it, because the attention is never on what's new.

Ahem. Rant over. Velvet Underground is certainly another terrific example.
Tangent: COBRA is a really bad idea too. First, COBRA is probably more expensive than health care you acquire yourself, because most employers acquire highest-common-denominator coverage and hide the expense in payroll and benefits accounting. Second, COBRA has a ticking time limit on it, which is exactly what you don't want with health insurance (and why you never want month-to-month or temporary coverage). You might as well not insure yourself if any catastrophic event is as likely to bankrupt you with insurance as without it, which is what happens when something bad happens in the latter part of your COBRA term.
They're inflating the cost difference.
Cloud : $0.10 / CPU-hour for "large scale" crawling. There's no reason to use a small, unreserved EC2 instance for large scale anything? I have a small reserved instance I use for git and bugzilla and so forth, it's slow as hell. That's why there are bigger ones.
People pay a lot to take care of the people they're related to, and the pets they own. When people could own people, they spent a lot of money maintaining those people. I guess we might be more evil than slave owners, but I think we're basically operating with the same instincts in a different legal environment.
Version properly formatted with photos:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05robi...
The situation varies from state to state--if you decline maternity coverage you have a lot better luck. Of course, you also better not have kids (or save up for them when you do have them!), which is morally/emotionally difficult in the edge case that you get pregnant.

This approach is also more compatible with the concept of "insurance" to begin with! I have never seen any sense in paying an insurance company to pay the doctor for your own routine care--shouldn't it be cheaper to just pay the doctor yourself? You buy insurance to level out the variance on unpredictable costs. Having children isn't some type of unpredictable medical emergency we buy insurance against, it's a voluntary decision with a relatively predictable cost. There's no sense in buying or selling maternity coverage.

Group coverage is just a way for those of us who don't have kids to subsidize those of us who do.

I think a mandate for insurance companies to ignore preexisting conditions, traded off against a mandate to buy health insurance, would be a sensible tradeoff for all parties. I think allowing competition between states would provide a better environment. I think there are good reasons for reform. I don't think maternity coverage needs to exist, I highly doubt it makes financial sense for insurance to cover routine care, and I don't think insurance should be bundled with employment.
This isn't my field, but I'm shocked this hasn't been done before. A bunch of computer geeks really took this long to hook up a thermometer to a server?
>> [OOP] can backfire badly if coders end up doing simple things in complex ways just because they can.

Very true. I'm taking several courses where the vast majority of students have only been exposed to Java, where as I've come from a C background with experience in several other languages. I'm shocked at how the other students have no sense of efficiency or simplicity - everything has to be about making other classes do the work, and it ends up being a horrible project.
From http://pluraprocessing.com/developer/index.html

Plura supports desktop and web-based games.

If the game is hosted on a website, like a Flash game, the
developer only needs to include 1 line of iframe code. We
will soon be releasing a Javascript API for dynamically
controlling how this iframe is loaded, giving the developer
control over starting, stopping, and controlling CPU usage
in Plura. The iframe loads a Java web applet, which runs
completely in memory. This applet is forcibly restricted
from accessing the user's computer by the sandbox model
provided by Sun.

See also -
http://pluraprocessing.com/developer/index.html

So far as I understand, they have multiple models.
One affiliate model is "Plura for Java Applets", where-as another is "Signed Java Applets"

I imagine there may be fewer options for unsigned applets, leaving the developer with less potential revenue every month, where as desktop application developers and signed java applications are left with the providers who don't need signed applications.

That said, I agree the Java dialog is ugly and scary ;(
If I were an Affiliate, I'd want to avoid it. It breaks the user-experience of your site into some gaudy and jarring, not to mention unbranded and unrelated to the information the user is after.
LaTeX based chat
I'm afraid most hackers need a chart showing differences between Arial and Verdana or even worse, Arial and Times!
I'd bet they top themselves within a year or two. The chans may have peaked in size, but what that means is the people who are most interesting there are going to be finding new ways to branch out to avoid newfags. I'd bet they consolidate and end up with something even more intense than 4chan was back in the glory days.
Pregnancy isn't the only issue, and it wasn't the issue in our case. You'll forgive me for not getting into more detail here. It is not as simple as "we don't want to subsidize pregnancy" (I sympathise with that). It's "women of childbearing age are more expensive to cover for a variety of reasons".

Despite a total lack of chronic medical problems in my family, declining maternity coverage would not have helped us. So let's lose that red herring.

Do I agree that the government shouldn't have to pay for routine predictable medical expenses? Of course I do. I understand the concept of insurance (to avoid catastrophic losses from rare events), and I also understand how totally distorted our health care system is because of the twisted incentives and lack of transparency in the private employer-funded health insurance system. I'm not wishing for the NHS, but I'm also not naive enough to think that one regulatory tweak (guaranteed issue) is going to solve our problems.

Finally, if you have a problem with the idea that the young, healthy, and fortunate are subsidizing the old, infirm, and poor, you need to revisit the entire concept of insurance. People who avoid acquiring insurance in their 20s --- all of whom will certainly try to get coverage in their late 30s --- are free-riding.
Bruce Schneier: The Future of the Security Industry
Google sidewiki: contribute information next to any webpage
I have a high-deductible plan from Assurant, with prices roughly equal to what they quote here (low $100s): http://www.assuranthealth.com/corp/ah/healthplans/individual...

Mandated insurance with guaranteed-issue is a tax on the young and healthy to subsidize the old and sick. My plan, for example, is illegal in NY and NJ which have strong community rating requirements.

You can certainly think that taxing single 20somethings to subsidize families and the elderly is a good decision as a matter of policy, but it's not going to do a whole lot to increase entrepreneurship.
It's easier, you pay for Helvetica while Arial is free. Also no graphic designer of at least basic skills uses Arial. Arial is only used on the Web.
Zorilla (Ictonyx striatus)