skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Half these things are common usage and basically considered proper by everyone who isn't a nazi. The others are so rare it isn't worth mentioning them.
That's an interesting thought. However, you would expect startups to be prone to more evere cycles and bubbles. People in office cubicles have more of a direct feedback from the ultimate value creation. You don't hire someone unless you need them to do a job.

Startups get started when a founder and investor are both willing to make it happen. That willingness is dependant on more speculation (in the individual case) then in the case of a cubicle worker.

Also, when you say 'startup' I expect you are talking about a specific type of starting company that fits into the YC model. While the jobs market seems to absorb an arbitrary number of people, some specific part of it such as the manufacturing sector cannot.
I guess the biggest advantage for Mr. Pavlina is that his wife is psychic so surely she can alert him to any big shit that's going to hit the fan so he can prepare for it and juice his income streams appropriately.
Works for me... just go to lite.facebook.com
The circumstances are quite different.

From what I know about the case, and I've only read a book or two on it and quite long ago, the friend that Turing took home later broke in to his house or something to that effect. Turing reported to the police and in the process of the investigation the whole thing spilled out.

So, even if it wasn't the first time he acted that way it doesn't really matter because there is 0 proof that Turing was 'blackmailable' because of his sexuality.
Has anyone seen an adequately objective breakdown of United States health care costs?

edit Here is the best I can find: http://www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?imID=1&parentID=6...
Recession's Accidental Entrepreneurs
the upside to the variable income lifestyle is a relatively small proportion of people living the glamorous lifestyle that Pavlina is selling but the downside is the much larger number of people who are barely scraping by making ends meet on the same system

While this is true, I don't think the assumption that most of the people who end up on top somehow deserve their success and those on the bottom deserve their failures is correct. More to the point, a moral system built on this is is cruel, damaging to one's psyche, and a bad way to motivate people to create things. Alain De Botton gives a very eloquent TED talk about this [1], which is much more interesting than this Black Swan pep talk bullshit.

The reality is: in any given attempt at a complicated problem (like most jobs/startups), most failures and successes are for reasons outside of one's control. The world is simply much more complicated than our minds can comprehend. What we can control is how many ways we attempt difficult problems, and this precisely why perseverance plays a much bigger role than intelligence in startup success [2]: because individuals that appear as extraordinarily intelligent don't really understand the world that significantly better than someone of average intelligence. There's a point past which linguistic dialects and the ideas prevalent in one's social circle affect perceived IQ much more than the quality of one's world model. But persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
I totally agree that it's a good rule of thumb to always at least wait for the first point release.

But it just got me thinking that we must understand these heuristics and not just follow them blindly.

I wasn't saying the OC did a bad thing, just thinking out loud about how "wait for the first point release" can be arbitrary since with such a popular software, you could read the feedback on various forums to see how stable it is.

If you're going to be having a major problem, chances are others will have it too. And if it's a minor problem that almost nobody has except you, it might not be fixed in the first point release.
Hmmm, this smells like opinion presented as fact to me. For example, 'an historic' is good English (in England, not sure about US-English convention) in the same way as you can say 'an honour' or 'an hour'; ie. because the 'h' is pronounced softly.
He doesn't really predict "misery until the end of 2011", you can have a growing GDP and a rise of unemployment at the same time.

Unemployment is well known lagging indicator. Its rise until at least 2010 is something widely accepted by governments and economists.
I really have a hard time trying to understand how you can even begin to reach such a conclusion.

Turing was already well underway to become a very special person indeed long before that happened, his mathematical and scientific skills were beyond dispute at a very young age.

A quote from the wikipedia article on Alan Turing:

"Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit"
You could build parts of your income via selling advertisements on content site, and then suplement the rest with freelancing.

I was able to bootstrap my game development website that way. $70 from ads revenue and $50 from a freelance work.

However, a site that generate passive income from advertisement still require maintenance work to grow (and maybe to keep). Even so, it does make money while you sleep, eat, and work.
Yes, they do.

In my opinion, the biggest cause of this is the artificial caps on the number of doctors graduated every year. Only a small fraction of qualified med school applicants are accepted each year. (In my idealism) more doctors would create more of a free market. The market would find ways to identify high quality doctors who deserve $1m a year, but there would also be the $200k/yr doctors for normal middle class and $50k doctors for low income areas.

The cynic would say it's because the medical community is being protectionist. The conservative would say it's those pesky liberals worrying too much about our safety. The doctors I've worked with speculate it's because of the "priest" like status that doctors have historically held in society.

For hackers... well, let's just say there's a lot of money to be made in medical software. Doctors value their time very much and are willing to pay silly amounts of money for modest efficiency improvements. Most hackers are scared away from medical software because of concerns of excess regulation and complexity. That's a fair concern, but that doesn't mean there's still not good opportunities.
> Right, learning the syntax of a programming is easy and quick, if you already understand the programming model.

Or at least, it should be. Hence my criticism of Perl.
The phrase "fixed income" is generally used to refer to people who are living off an annuity or a pension that doesn't change from year to year, so that they would be totally screwed by inflation or a large unexpected expense.

Referring to a salaried job as a "fixed income" is such blatant hyperbole that I can't take the rest of his article seriously.
Arctic Shortcut Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws
The article is right for the same reason that horoscopes seem right, because it doesn't really say anything. To my knowledge, nobody intelligent was seriously suggesting that a sharp recovery was likely. His article then discounts that relatively absurd possibility and then states his belief that the market will either be U-shaped, flat, or decline with a double-dip recession.

Given that at that point a serious depression was pretty much ruled out as well, he basically said that all possible responses were, in his opinion, possible... and then people read it and thought "wow, that horoscope was totally correct."
You're basically reiterating the same arguments that we've heard over and over again. What is 'new' now? Did I miss something about Apple's press conference/keynote that brings something new to this argument?
From the essay: On the other hand, maybe you want to inspire and motivate people for a living. This takes a lot more skill than delivering pizzas, but it’s in much higher demand relative to the supply.

Gosh, if I decided I wanted to inspire and motivate people for a living, who would I consult for advice on how to do it?...
While coding ?? I have the room dark, the music off or set to something very quiet that I know well so it won't distract me, if possible the door locked, the phone switched off, the cat tied up in the hallway and everybody else in the house sedated.

How on earth can you listen to an audiobook while coding ? Are you superhuman ?
I also get confused because I thought the Michael Jackson owned the Beatles' copyrights. Does Jackson's estate own Apple Records?
Thanks, right now I'm listening to Marshall Goldsmith and really liking it.
I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention the effect that the AMA has had on the medical community. The article points out that in France and the UK one aspiring doctors go to medical school for free immemdiately after high school, whereas in the US aspiring doctors go to a university before going to medical school and must pay tuition for both (not to mention the residency period afterward). This is a consequence of rules put in place by the AMA (which, in turn, are backed up by legislation). The AMA has ensured that doctors in the US tend to be quite good, but it has also restricted the supply. The result is that cheap, lower-quality doctors are forbidden from entering the marketplace. In many cases, this is good -- I wouldn't want to undergo open-heart surgery with a low-quality doctor. But if I break my arm, do I really need to see a doctor who has had over 10 years of training? I would likely be just as well off seeing a doctor who is not quite as good and has had only a few years of training.

As a consequence of the AMA, patients are forced to see extremely well-trained doctors even for routine procedures. In many cases, this is just overkill. But the net effect is reduction in the supply of doctors, and an increase in their salaries.
He left out a lot of other stuff. Hospital rooms. Nurses, lab technicians, all the other staff at the hospital/clinic/doctor's office. Other overhead (office rent, equipment leases) on and on.

Liability insurance premiums for malpractice insurance. A huge cost. Enough to drive doctors away from some specialties, such as obstetrics.

There's some overhead in insurance company billing operations, but I've not seen any good evidence that the government can do it for less.
Diabetes - blindness, circulation problems, infections, amputations. It's not at all clear that health care for fat people would be less than for thin people.
Ah, my mistake; I saw the reference to Django templates and assumed Python.

<troll>Try switching to a language that doesn't suck, okay?</troll>
For what it's worth, I'm running 10.6 on one of my Macs, and I still have some Ports that don't work on it.

In particular, I've had issues with ghc and R. Most other software (both common and uncommon) has been okay, but I'd recommend most people wait another month or so, unless 10.6 fixes something important to you, or is otherwise significant.
What "childhood loss and trauma" was it that led Turing to find nineteen-year-olds attractive, exactly? I'm pretty sure most people find people in their late teens and early 20s attractive.

Complete speculation here, but your use of "boys" makes it sound like you conflate Turing's actions with paedophilia. The ongoing and statistically inaccurate association of homosexuality with paedophilia is one of the reasons public actions like this one affirming that one can be both homosexual and legally and morally respectable are still necessary.
In Silicon Valley, a sports-ticket options experiment begins
I believe it. The administrative overhead is huge in private health care. I did some contract work for a doctor a few years ago and it was amazing that this small office had a staff of 8 or 9 people basically devoted to moving around paper files, making copies, making phone calls for prescriptions, etc. This small general practice office had probably 12 employee's total but only 2 doctors. So using this as an example that's an administrative/care ratio of 6 to 1. When you widen it out to tests, drugs, etc the actual number of people directly giving care to a patient is tiny compared to all the supporting elements.
Mate, I agree with you, I'd do the same if I was writing kernel code. But do you really need to be that isolated while fixing some CSS or running admin tasks? If it's the case that all your work really is that interesting, you are in a very enviable position.
exactly. The true costs of each burger are deferred from the McDonald's counter and amortized over a lifetime and a population in the form of Medicare deductions on your paycheck. This article is timely as I had written this blog post last week suggesting a fast food tax:
http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2009/09/01/fast-food-tax/

It wasn't an optimal solution but it at least attempted to redirect the costs of poor eating choices to the people who make the bad decisions. The proposal from the NYT article is way simpler and more effective:

yank the "preexisting condition" defense from insurance companies and they become instantly incented to encourage healthy eating. Current advocates of proper eating habits gain a powerful ally at that point.

sean
Oh, sweet! A Facebook person on HN! I thought y'all were super-secretive.

I'm a huge fan.
The physician's assistant is a position that was created in order to fill the need for lower cost medical care where direct consultation with an actual physician is not required but it does not seem to have really taken off in the US as far as I can tell. One thing that does seem to have an effect in lowering medical costs long term is technology such as the Da Vinci robot which allows "regular" doctors to perform procedures that previously could only be done by highly skilled surgeons.
techcrunch was had.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/yeah-ok-so-facebook-pun...

Great study in knee-jerk reactions
What would be the advantage of using this over, say, lighttpd with one of the many existing python frameworks?

Does this web server offer any specific gains? Or is it just a question of personal taste?
Australia's NBN: Like giving candy to babies
ghc is one of a handful of MacPorts which does not work with Snow Leopard, although this should be fixed soon (32-bit only, though): http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20132
I'm not saying that record labels do nothing, but the article is arguing that because The Beatles and Apple generated some marketing buzz that it's a death knell for the Recording studios. My point is that the recording studios never generated any buzz that wasn't artist specific. No one ever got excited about a press release from Universal Music or BMI... unless it was related to an artist.

Using Apple (Computers) and The Beatles as examples of 'new media' is either woefully ignorant or intentionally misleading. The Beatles are the most famous 'rock' band (love them or hate them) in modern times (because there were more popular rock bands in the Dark Ages, but the records were lost). To declare that the recording industry is dead because artists can generate their own buzz, and then use The Beatles as a prime example? It's a chicken-or-the-egg problem. You can practically generate buzz on command when you get famous enough, but you need to use buzz to become that famous... and not every band can become that famous.

This is the same as when Radiohead released In Rainbows with the 'pay what you want' model for online distribution -- which Trent Reznor claims to have paid like $5k for to support the idea. The only reason that Radiohead can do something like that is because they are already famous. Some no name garageband can't do that. Everyone would 'set their own price' at $0.
Facebook allows public verbal diarrhea too now
I'm not aware of any DB2-specific instructions, but POWER6 and above implement a decimal floating point instruction set, allowing things like regulatoriliy-mandated financial computations to be hardware accelerated instead of computed in software. That's clearly a nod to the same market that is buying DB2.
Startups: Does relying on analytics make you miss a big breakthrough?
Let's just say that I'm easily distracted. It can take me hours to really get in to something and the slightest disturbance around me will draw me out of whatever it is that I'm doing.

Best hour of the day to work: at night (it's 4:30 am here right now, to give you an idea...).

Not everything that I do is 'interesting', there is plenty of grunt work but even there it helps if you can just dig in and stay underwater for a while rather than to have to get out of it and back in again.

I find it hard to keep datastructures and code in my head for any amount of time when I'm not actively engaged with them.

To add an audio book to that would be unthinkable to me, I could do one or the other, but definitely not both.
You do realise the guy is / was a coder right?

He used to write shareware games / but then turned to doing the self-help stuff. Agreed that the article was pretty poor, but the guy is/was a bit above the 'get rich quick' folks
Radio airtime and purposefully catchy tunes that stick in your head. I've found that the more you hear a song over and over again on the radio the more you end up liking it, even if you hated it at first. That's what hypnotizes people.
Yeah — events they didn’t go to. So?
Thoughts on the Future of the Boutique Software Shop
Must we have this flame war again? Or if you insist, can you please at least pack your arguments into one post, complete with competing definitions of "free", and "open", and sneering sideways attacks at the other side's development model or developer personalities?
My software political philosophy is built on a wider and bigger framework called individualist anarchism and libertarianism.

Now, each ethical system, with the exception of maybe nilhists, have its own set of duties that are owned to other person(s).

So what is the duty of my ethical system? I think it can be sumed up as "first, do no harm". Then it perscribe protection from interferences as well protection of the individual from corecison and whatever forces that have decided for whatever reason to attack that person(s), whether it is for the "benefit" of the group or just plain tranny.

In the libertarian ethical system, you will not take somebody's property for the sake of welfare or other reason without consent. You also have freedom of contract and the right to bear arm, especially when somebody decided to violates property right and start killing/murdering/looting/taxing. You have the freedom to conduct trade, and compete on the free market, as well give charity to others.

However, you don't have the right to internet, free education, free roads, or health care in exchange for protection from stealing and theft(which is sometime known as taxation).

As for what this mean in practice in free software for me?(I know I skiped a lot of stuff)

1. Copyright is pretty much a violation of property right.

2. Consumers owned software that they brought by default.

3. It doesn't matter if I couldn't compete with "pirates", I don't have a right to make a living.

4. Economic intervention is wrong. It doesn't matter if copyright give 50000% increase in productivity.

So this is why I want to move toward copyfree free software to the best extent as possible. I wish I could license all my stuff under the public domain, but people licensed their stuff under MIT or GPL. I want to use their stuff, so I licensed similiarity.

Old code are still licensed under too much of a restrictive licenses.

Still, I have some plan to do public domain software in the future.
Yeah, I agree. For long-polling apps it seems like Tornado gives you a huge advantage.

For other web apps though, the frontend-backend delay is comparatively more important, because usually there's a load balancer or reverse proxy in charge of buffering up data arriving from distant/laggy browser connections and hitting the web application server with it all at once.
I was planning to wait until SIMBL was working on 10.6, but it appears that it already is if you tell the app it's modifying to open in 32-bit, so I might upgrade shortly.

I agree that with such widely distributed software, browsing forums and news aggregators might well be as useful as waiting to see what's fixed.
The reference to Turings childhood loss was to Chris Morcom, the first person Alan Turing fell in love with while at school. But Turing was already recognized as quite gifted at that time. It is possible, but not proven that because Morcom was slightly older he might have pulled Alan Turing along in his slipstream.

I just found this:

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/spirit.html

From which I gather it influenced his views on religion strongly but it didn't detract from his other work.
When I felt like complaining to reddit about it I went and found several forum threads of people with the same problem: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9catv/ask_reddit...
This Is How Total Destruction On Earth Looks from Space
I suppose I might, given a few centuries...
I think the point is that he's proud to be the one that's leading Britain in the right direction. Maybe he's also pleased that now history books about Alan Turing will have a blurb about the apology with this name attached to it.

While the UK shouldn't be proud of the way homosexuals were treated in the past, but I think it's perfectly acceptable to be proud that they are treated (relatively) well now.
Well, the AMA appears to use an almost Marxist model of labour supply:

> Apparently the American Medical Association has a board that calculates something called "relative value units", or RVUs. These attempt to measure how difficult a given
procedure is for the physician [...] We have a name for setting prices this way. It's called the "labour theory of value", and it was invented by a guy named Karl Marx.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/09/ma...

http://www.slate.com/id/2227082/
They could formally pardon him as well.
They both wear pajamas to work.
If you hit ctrl+f and replace "fixed" with "low" and "variable" with "high", then and only then does this article make any sense at all.

He points out that people on fixed incomes are screwed when things go wrong and expenses mount. Apparently in his mind, people with variable incomes (which I've had my entire adult life, btw) can just make more when they really need it or something.

In fairness the first half of the article was so dumb that I had to stop, so maybe it redeemed itself after.
It's more of a way for a society to formally make reparations for past bad (group) actions. Even if the person is dead, there is an implicit promise to never let this happen again.
Isn't a fax more admissible in court? Posting pics (or getting tagged) on FB just became that more dangerous.
This reminds me of the story a Japanese girl once told me of her visit to Disneyland. At one of the restaurants she ordered the steak and salad. The salad came first and by the end of it she was so full she couldn't even think about eating the steak.
Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us
It's a free market - leave it alone. If anyone wants to be a doctor - go to school for 12 years. No one is stopping you.

The article also fails to address the ridiculous cost of malpractice insurance that doctors must carry (for obvious reasons).
You know what else blows? That website. My eyes bleed. Learn how to put "text" on a "website".
Libdispatch is open source