skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again, this discussion insists on equating health care with health insurance. As any good hacker knows, the solution should directly address the cause of the problem, not merely the symptoms of the problem.

The problem is the quickly rising cost of health care and the amount that we, as a society, spend on it each year. The cause of the problem is that people don't buy their health care like they do just about everything else -- it's all paid for by insurance.

After reading this article, which was recently on HN, virtually everything I've heard from experts and policy makers sounds silly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
That's a pretty good one too. I might steal it. I mean, I might push the "Relay anecdote" button the next time I'm describing programming to someone.
Didn't you lose several thousand dollars on the exchange rate when you pulled money across via your credit card? I know when I use my Canadian credit card abroad, Mastercard converts at a rate 1-2% worse than what I can get elsewhere.
The problem is structural all right: the US could afford to provide universal, single payer (Canadian style) health insurance for what it currently spends on Medicare and Medicaid, given that current per capita public spending on health care is actually a bit higher than the OECD average.

If the public sector inefficiencies related to means testing and the private sector inefficiencies related to risk selection, bureaucracy and profit were eliminated, current public spending on health care would be plenty to provide universal, comprehensive coverage based on medical need.

The current bizarro-world hybrid system combines the worst aspects of private and health care while still leaving some 50 million Americans uninsured and at least another 50 million with only partial insurance that won't actually cover them in the case of a serious medical emergency.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard: What's new for all users
AT&T isn't the only company with a $/month GPS app on the App Store.

Not that its clear if map updates will be free or in-app purchases with TomTom.
Sure Artin's Algebra has a prominent place on my bookshelf. That class was by no means called "College Algebra".
Is it not? When monkeys emulate their trainers that is seen as an intelligent act. Babies emulate everything they can as they're learning. Imitation is a big part of intelligence as we know it.
Do What You Love And Make Career Incidental
It is unlikely that your anecdotal stories are better evidence than years&years of studies.

Supermodels aren't relevant because they lie so far outside the norm, and can't be used to predict the behavior of a typical woman (even a very attractive woman).
That term stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", right? As such, I don't see how it applies to my point.

If you're looking to do something noticeable, do something noticeable. Open source has nothing to do with the issue. I mean sure, you could conceivably do something noticeable in an open source project, but then you could also conceivably do something noticeable working at your cube farm.

Startups are by definition noticeable, otherwise they go away immediately.
Deeply embedded DSLs in Haskell: overloading everything under the sun
Most of the new joints charge about $3 for a cupcake

Can't you get a dozen cupcakes at the grocery store for that price?
Security Alert – TotalSecurity | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
When I used to drive to/from work I always had an audiobook to listen to. Sure, you can't read, but there turns out to be plenty of time to listen.
For the same reason that Mrs Browl hands me tightly sealed jars to open: it's easier, since men tend to be physically stronger. You might as well ask why basketball is dominated by tall athletes, or why jockeys are petite.
This is highly unfair: to provide a technological boost only to a single application is not what I'm comfortable to name as a 'free market'.
How To: Recreate the Apple Product Slider with JQuery
I think it's got some interesting aspects to it; but it's one of those types of ideas that would have to be executed perfectly and have a really good hook for getting users to join. Unfortunately, the answer to that usually including pictures.
You missed his point. He's saying your study doesn't speak to the question. While his anecdotal evidence might not be accurate but it at least addresses the question at hand.
Previous related threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84070

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630258
Reading a physics book is dumb, but understanding a physics book is not. You could - given enough time and intelligence - derive all of physics yourself.

Pretty much everybody alive has at some point in his time come up with some rule or law in principle that somebody else had already codified, there is nothing special about that, other than that we seem to have this generalization capability built in at a very deep level.

Your intelligence is what allows you to use the book, I can store the book in a computer but it will not get one tiny little bit smarter because of it. There not being any intelligence present to understand the deeper meaning of the string of symbols that make up the book.

Intelligence in common language is often confused with 'smart', you are either intelligent or you are not. But even the most stupid human is intelligent, and all computers are not.

I can see what you're getting at with the argument that if both humans and computers are built up out of atoms that in theory we could both be equivalent in intelligence.

But there are some very subtle differences between humans and computers. For one we operate in a mostly analog world, and computers are digital. That's a small difference at first sight, because after all if you add enough bits to your floats eventually the steps will be so small that it won't matter any more. Or does it ?

Even a small step is still a step, a thresholding operation.

Simulating a chemical soup, all the effects of things like quantum mechanics, including brownian motion and so on might some day yield an intelligence.

But simply assuming that more computer power will give us something that is intelligent is simply not plausible, more data does not mean you are smarter, just that you have more data at your disposal, a larger computer does not mean thinking in a different way, it merely means following programs and manipulating data at a higher speed.

If intelligence is a continuum between '0' (for a rock) and '1' for a human being with basic intelligence then we have departed a little bit along this axis away from the '0', but we are infinitely closer to the 0 end than we are to the '1' end.

And we seem to disagree on whether or not a computer has ever created art, but that's fine. A computer does not express itself in any way that it has not been programmed to do, and in those cases that it does we reach for the debugger.
"it's like writing a screenplay to be acted by tiny little electronic things, also known as computers.".
I think you miss the point how much programming went in to writing the software that does the imitation. I'm imagining a fast Fourier transform to analyze the incoming audio samples, software that knows about key signatures, tempo and so on. Then given an algorithmic transformation function with a random generator you can come up with new data. But it is really just a transformation of the old data.

Given white noise as input the program would not produce a symphony that would strike us as a masterpiece or move us to tears. That takes a composer.
> And all they do with that money is drag down the entire user experience with horrible, overpriced service which cripples the device severely.

How do you think us Verizon customers feel? At least you get phones with WiFi...
The cost-shifting argument is curious.

The simplified version of it runs:

- medicare (etc) say: 'this is what we reimburse for this procedure', non-negotiable

- providers that take medicare charge the private sector more than the price medicare dictates

...then the argument runs that medicare is forcing private health-care purchasers to make up the shortage / subsidize its low premiums.

The curious part:

- if the private-sector purchasers (whether individuals or insurers) aren't getting their money's worth why are they buying?
I can't help but note that if that is the case then you're doing it wrong™.

Most likely, but since ffmpeg has the least helpful documentation I've seen (for a newbie at least), I'm not surprised.
Too bad that twitter shorten the urls you liking it or not.
No, your problem was that this community is in no way averse to hip-hop.
I found this today, I think it's worth reading. It's regarding A) http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Behind the Scenes of OptiMap
on my previous company, there was this hot admin..... . i mean hot.

Sometimes it was hard to concetrate, but sometimes it was actually motivating. It brought the competitiveness out of me, and I actually was pretty productive, while i was not thinking about stuff.....

But the upside of the whole thing that I drank a lot of water, since the kitchen was on that way, and I got to upgrade my wardrobe to look good.

Since then, I started dressing much better.
Should be the other way around... for each guy working on a captcha there should be a team trying to break it.
That changes over time. Nobel's intention was to give it to people that gave the greatest benefit to mankind during the year. A few prices in the later years have been directed toward less base-research like inventions.

Also... why do people keep refering to the "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" as a nobel prize in economics? It's not one of the subjects that Nobel himself thought worthy.
Body hacks: Swedish bloke attempts lactation
While I acknowledge the possibility that "real" intelligence may be inherently non-computational, it's ridiculous to claim that it "equally might be" so. (which I take to mean roughly 50% probable). I claim 99.9% certainty that a computational process will demonstrate general human intelligence in the next hundred years, given that civilization isn't decimated before then. We don't even have to be clever enough to organize superpowerful computers into rudimentary general intelligence; we just need to understand our own brains at a fine enough level to emulate them computationally.

And, of course, you don't need anything close to general intelligence to do well in sports.
Complexity is insecurity
I start with telling, "computers are idiots, they have no sense and no thinking ability. But they are really fast and do not get tired of repeating. They pretend to be clever by repeating written orders perfectly and fast. So someone has to write down the orders that an idiot can understand and repeat quickly."
> There's no such thing as gray goo and never will be because you'd have to violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to get it.

As someone who only heard of "grey goo" very recently, care to explain why this is the case?
Just show 10 pics, nine over 8 and one under 3. Not only fast, but pleasant to the eye.
Why does software contains bugs? Why can't some module on a server rewrite it to make it bug free?
I think the challenge is not so much to explain how programming works (I think most have some vague idea that it involves making the computer do "stuff") but to explain why it matters to do it well and why you get wound up about seemingly incomprehensible stuff.

I use the furniture making analogy; if you need a chair, a whole bunch of people can make you one. Some will make you a crappy chair from 2x2; some can make you a gorgeous looking hand-carved work of art; some might make you a modern sleek chair. While I might prefer the Louis XVI style chair to the Ikea style chair, the fact that the chair should not collapse when I sit on it is an absolute requirement.

Hence, some people are great programmers and some people are bad programmers, and even the great programmers often disagree on questions of style.
Composers aren't born composers either. Through years of practice an individual learns how to manipulate the instrument and over this time period, listens to/plays a wide variety of well known musical compositions. Only then is the individual able to use his knowledge to create something new. It would be similar to loading the program with most compositions from a particular time period, and then having something produced which both sounds different enough to be distinguishable, but similar enough to be pleasant.
Steganographic Typo-Based URL Shorteners: Add a Link With Zero New Characters
If you're using Brightkite, you can get background location on your iPhone using this: http://github.com/HiroProt/playnice/tree/master

Of course, that's a total hack ;)
I think it's sad/funny there is no mention of how a middle aged white man (with C-level experience of course) is best qualified to revitalize and revolutionize a makeup company.

How many female product/service industries are "lead" by middle aged white men...scary when you think about it.
I don't know about your grocery store, but my local grocery store has a pretty shitty bakery. I'd rather have one well-made cupcake then a dozen mediocre cupcake experiences.

That said, you can probably get the ingredients at your store and do this for $3/dozen unit price.
It might have 'degenerated' the moment someone got it into their head that the sort of mathematical cleverness one sees in HAKMEM is somehow transferable and applicable to wild and woolly fields such as 'life' or 'the economy' or 'human relations'. It's a tremendously tempting and alluring notion - its lustre is such that otherwise rational thinkers are eager to leave their critical faculties in their other pants and toot its every minor or anecdotal random success as deeply significant.
It's not my study, and it's not a single study, but years of research. The only question I'm addressing here is whether people are attracted to others of the same level of attractiveness, since he requested evidence.

Are women more flexible about their partner's attractiveness based on other factors? Maybe, but without any kind of research, it's all conjecture and confirmation bias.
So music isn't music unless it's Mozart?

I don't think it's me who is misunderstanding the discussion here. You're using double standards.

When a primal tribe is beating on drums: music. When a computer builds a primitive melody? That's not music! Those are just bits and bytes!

If I follow your logic to the extreme a computer can never compose music because there will always be a human who built the computer, or built the computer that built the computer that composed the music. I don't buy that.
if the private-sector purchasers (whether individuals or insurers) aren't getting their money's worth why are they buying?

There may be a massive consumer surplus being eaten up by this price-fixing. In Europe, that consumer surplus comes in the form of low costs. In the US, it would come in the form of high profits for a little while, then higher competition.
I still can't believe he manages to cut the deals that he does. I was really shocked when it showed up on Boost Mobile.

Is Loopt really that great? Does he prove that it makes money for the phone company? I guess that must be the pitch, since it would be easier to track what's driving spending from a pre-pay customer.
The patent number, as far as I can tell, is 20080208118. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0208118.html
Yes, that is true, they are not born composers. But their art is not to take a piece of music that already exists and then transform it according to a set of rules, that is where the 'art', 'inspiration' and 'transpiration' comes in, and it takes a being capable of emotion to be able to do that.

You are seriously underestimating what composing is, it is not merely 'coming up with sounds that are distinguishable and pleasant'. That's the mechanical end of the business, any piece of software that you teach about basic key signatures and tempo rules & phrasing could in theory do that.

Composing is much like story telling, to paint a picture in sound that evokes an emotion with a purpose in the listener.

On the day a computer comes up with something that moves me as strongly as Bach or Vivaldi I'll eat my hat, but I won't be holding my breath for that.
Smart money management tip: keep a buffer in place. Stay one month ahead of the interest payments.

So even if something goes wrong with your business - you have at least 30 days (and usually 45-50 days) before having payment issues.
Derek Sivers's notes on Hugh MacLeod's "Ignore Everybody"
Yes there was some cost involved, but because we knew exactly what we were going to do the account in nl was already in $CAN. We also had a US dollar account because most of our income was from the US (24x7 advertising).

I think the total on about 90K Canadian dollars spent came to a few hundred bucks, not exactly free, but compared to what the wire costs, delays and so on would have been I figure the time saved more than made up for that.
Not exactly correct. For an FDA market approval a medical device must be proven to be safe AND effective. This can be proven in several ways: through a trial or as I believe in this case, through similarity to another proven device.
And this is not the only bar. If you have a new device you also have to get reimbursement from health insurance. This is not guaranteed just because you have FDA approval.
I didn't know that. Good suggestion I'll try it.
US Agenda

1. Health care reform

2. Phone network reform?
Now if only we could get rid of that troublesome http://
If you run a venture that has exponential growth potential - then your ROI is usually likely to exceed the interest rate with ease.

My entire family is into diamonds. So I know a bit about how the diamond trade works. Every trader takes loans and usually the interest rate is 1 to 1.5% per month. Very similar to credit card rates. Everyone pays them without a lot of issues - because the ROI is there.

I know its the same with a lot of small to mid textile firms too.
Not to mention Verizon cripples GPS, bluetooth, etc.
amateur is one who loves a particular activity; doing something for nothing is a matter of choice, not of inability.
This app is awesome. I'm a musical hobbyist, but today was the first time that anything has ever remotely made it sound like I can sing.
How about replacing http:// by a universally accepted unicode char so we can save 7 more chars?

Pick yours...
"...study which found that the majority of iphone users make over $80,000 in salary."

Are these professionals really the target market for Loopt though? Loopt seems more useful to teens/college kids etc.
And the Javascript equivalent wont?
And what date do you expect?
Plus radio, navigation, flight, supersonic flight, space flight, sattelites, computers that break the 1 GHz clock barrier (remember that one?). I daresay everything that was invented since the Greeks owned the world.
I've got:

bin/
build/
downloads/
src/sandbox/
src/git/
src/svn/
src/cvs/

The 'downloads' directory is actually my junk drawer, and should probably be called something like 'misc', but my brain is hardwired to type ~/d<tab>.

I'll admit that it's pretty silly that I keep my source code organized by version-control-program, but I have to do it that way to remind me which project comes from which kind of repository.
"the day before last Saturday" doesn't work
Windows security is better than Linux and BSD? I thought SELinux, TrustedBSD, and OpenBSD have windows beat.
Sure, and you can also buy a box of store brand macaroni and cheese for $0.25 - or go to the gastropub and pay $10 for a serving. It really isn't an even comparison.
I'm not saying a computer can not compose music, I'm saying that without real intelligence there is no composition, merely the following of a set of rules, a program. Intelligence, artificial or not, is capable of such stuff, a mechanical device interpreting fixed rules is not.

When a primal tribe beats on a drum they've just invented music. When a computer beats on a drum it has been told by some human to beat a drum.
Fab hack: protheses for $50 instead of $250,000
But some actions are inherently masculine or feminine, and there shouldn't be anything wrong that. A lot of these things are innate.

Why are boys more likely to play with firetrucks and police cars? Why are auto mechanics overwhelmingly male? Men see a flat tire. It's a problem with a clear outcome. So they take action and solve it.

I'm not saying that women can't do it. But I can see why it's something men are more inclined to do.
Since it sounds like a number of people are maintaining local patches to this library, might it make sense to fork it on GitHub to try to get some additional contributors onboard?
Piffle, sama, your vote doesn't count. :-P
I had no difficulty guessing the content from the title, and the Economist (which chose the title) has quite a good editorial system already.
The FDA approval process is downright criminal. 7 years? wtf?
I love that - permission to quote it?
This list is terrible for its omissions. The most important:

* Local bank branches, thanks to Direct Banking (e.g. HSBC Direct, ING Direct)

* Local realtors, thanks to the likes of http://redfin.com

* Local and Community colleges, thanks to the likes of http://straighterline.com

* Credit cards and Banks as the sole distributor of unsecured credit, thanks to the likes of http://prosper.com

And so on...
If only there were some sort of website where people voted on interesting articles they find to promote them to a front page.

Oh, or some sort of RSS reader that allowed you to conveniently share interesting articles with your friends.
well ... i'm not with tc on the alando case. alando was basically the unofficial german ebay and they had to buy and i guess it worked out very well.
However, the question is whether a 'real' magnetic monopole must necessarily be a fundamental particle. Perhaps this is one of the only ways in which the properties of a magnetic monopole manifest themselves.
Think of it this way: planning for negative scenarios is generally implies that you're willing to deal with them. To be willing to deal with them, you probably think that you're capable of dealing with them.

Even though dealing with negative situations isn't kittens-and-puppies happy, it is solidly optimistic. That's the kind of positive thinking that helps you.
Harmonix: How 'horrendous failure' led to Rock Band
SELinux and TrustedBSD are probably safer than Windows. Not sure I'd go that far with OpenBSD.
I wish you could use this to Auto-Tune your outgoing phone calls. Sure, it would get annoying as hell after around 30 seconds. But those first 30 seconds would be glorious.
I would be happy to see the end of (human-readable) URLs too. I think they're holding the net back the same way telephone numbers are becoming a drag on, er, telephony.
Why would a man be less qualified? Should a female be automatically assumed unqualified to run a men's magazine or or a cigar manufacturer? Why are either of those scenarios scary?
i'm not convinced... i kind of like the anonymity a telephone number affords.
Doh, another one of these binocular-visual-only tricks. Racism!
Because that's basically what the article says?

The real question is why AT&T is proactively tracking phone location (if they are).
>>it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat.

Isn't the point of a device like this that it can increase the concentration of chemo in tumors while keeping the concentration as low as possible in non-cancerous tissue?

Which should help that point (that is, manage to kill off enough cancer cells that the immune system or some other treatment can wipe out any surviving).

(As someone else noted, the article referenced some paper supporting doing this method.)

Let us all hope this works really well.