skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems you are trying to argue the case that health insurance is not "insurance" in the way other instruments are. I think we all get that. There are certainly better words, but that's the word commonly used and I think most people can context switch between "insurance" for theft of your Van Gogh and "insurance" for pregnancy.

I had a good conversation with my closest friend, an obstetrician, a month ago. After lots of discussion on what may happen with health care reform, he told me he thought most everyone would be best served if there were no institutions around any aspect of health care and every aspect was pay-out-of-your-pocket as it once was. He may be right, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. The "country doctor" is a great metaphor for what was and what maybe should be, but there are numerous reason why we can't go back.

Like it or not, society pays for lots of things that are not evenly shared: the roads you drive on, the schools you attend, the court systems that protect people that wind up in law suits, the meat inspectors that are paid by government funds when clearly some people don't eat meat. The list goes on. This is not the root of the problem. Public compromise is part of the grand beauty of living in a diverse ecosystem.

I agree health care is far too complex and there should be more simple and competitive options. All I can say is if you want that, you probably need to spend more time being a part of ensuring for a larger pool of honest people that work in government. What we will get out of this new health care bill (if it does pass) will look like your typical big piece of congressional sausage. Your tired of congressional sausage? All I can recommend is to spend more effort getting honest brokers into Congress.
I actually wasn't trying to be derogatory. "Do the Same" is a pretty common Indian English phrase.

Just like "Do the Needful".
As a citizen of a country with universal health care, I can tell you that health care didn't even enter my head when I elected to become self employed and start my own company.

1. I don't need health insurance if I'm happy to be covered under the public system. Nobody goes bankrupt from healthcare costs in my country.
2. Because of universal coverage, purchasing private healthcare for my family costs about $200/month, and it's a personal policy, not an employer based policy.
3. If I employ someone I don't even have to have a discussion with them about healthcare. It is assumed they will sort out their own health insurance, the same as they sort out their own car insurance.

There is no doubt that health insurance has an effect on entrepreneurship and new company formation when it is one of the highest startup costs, that needn't even exist. I mean, before I started reading threads like this in HN, the thought never even entered my head.
Which brings us back to entrepreneurship. Some of tomorrow’s potential entrepreneurs are today’s employees at firms that provide health insurance. They may have powerful new ideas that will build the firms of tomorrow. But if they leave their current job to work on those ideas they may find themselves without access to reliable health insurance. If they are very young and healthy, this may not be a major impediment. But for older entrepreneurs who have developed ideas through years of working for others, the fear of losing health insurance when they go out on their own can be a barrier to taking that leap.

You're right, though. I used the word "the" when I should have used the word "a".
Agreed, along with "Did X just Y?" which is usually just speculative linkbait.
What magic negotiation or concession can we offer in the next 18 months that will get them to stop pursuing nukes that we haven't tried before?

I think the involvement of China and Russia is the new development that may make the threat of sanctions more meaningful.
Yay, obscure idiom time!

The phrase "terminate with prejudice," largely fallen into disuse today, means basically "fire this person and blacklist them from ever working here again". The variant "terminate with extreme prejudice" was popularized by the film Apocalypse Now and is a euphemism of sorts meaning "assassinate".

Basically implying (mostly tongue in cheek) that Google's retribution might go beyond just "terminate their AdWords account".
How to Hold Down 10 Jobs Simultaneously
Is Moot scared of 'Fair Game' policy?
You can make the argument that people should plan carefully and achieve strong financial stability before having children. I think that's a dumb argument, but I recognize that I might not win the argument with another entrepreneur.

But it's a red herring. There are any number of issues that can prevent you from getting coverage even if you "decline maternity coverage". A big problem for insurers appears to be "having a female reproductive system". Another problem is "having been admitted to the hospital before".

For the 20somethings here without the life experience to know this, just for what it's worth --- cost of an emergency C section: calamitous.
yep, the "revoked arbitrarily" aspect seems to not be well understood by most.
Late last year I announced a new policy at TechCrunch – we don’t do embargoes. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, and designed to stir up chaos in the PR ranks.

Good to see techcrunch being classy as ever and openly admitting that they don't really care about factual reporting.
Watching the Transition of Twitter to a Datapipe
"For me OOP essentially means" etc: that's the key. OOP means different things to different people. So the term is confusing and people who seek clarity want to avoid it.
Google CEO sees one small acquisition a month
How I got started: Papa John's founder John Schnatter - Sep. 23, 2009
YouTube User Inspires Favicon Change
New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies
agreed, primarily my talks focus on consumer Internet biz models where you can collect customer reaction to features & UI quickly, in order to make decisions.

it applies somewhat, but less well, to long-latency businesses that involve enterprise products / offline sales.

and yes, I know the slides violate every rule of good presentation design (color, bullets, etc). it's intentional, and I'm pretty immature. seriously.
Needs more tornado. Or, err, twisted.web.
If You Need to Work Better, Maybe Try Working Less
Linux sound is a steaming pile
great post - you gotta love the enjoyment of Larry as they say in boston - he's a playa

It was fun to watch the video on youtube that is in the comments - that was funny as s$it
Isn't that like what the SETI project does? (Except that they don't buy the cpu power, they ask people to volunteer)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI#SETI.40home

"Any individual can become involved with SETI research by downloading the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software program, attaching to the SETI@home project, and allowing the program to run as a background process that uses idle computer power."
Hand-Washing no defense against Swine Flu
Yahoo Blowin Out a $100 Million Ad Campaign
Enjoyed the blog, thanks for sharing.

Trying to find a real reason to buy an infrared meter..
Any recent large-scale experiences with Rackspace Cloud?
Wow, I'm glad I don't have to use LaTex.
I don't understand the "(not worth reading)" at the end of your headline.
Suggesting that a segment of Anonymous /doesn't/ treat him as a figurehead is possibly equally misinformed.

Actually, the only informed statement to make about Anonymous is that there isn't such thing as a capital-letter Anonymous. Considering them the funhouse-mirror version of Iain M. Banks's Culture is closer to the truth than otherwise.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-latex/

Adium used to have a plugin for this too, which I used to use, but I haven't bothered to see if there's a current version.
"Yeah, it usually isn't a good idea to make big brags showing experimental mockups before you have anything in reality. Apple seems to like to show the finished product."

Unless, of course, you never intended to release the product anyway...
There's another reason people "dislike" the color of the bike shed: they love participatory righteous indignation, and the bike shed's color is something convenient to complain about. That so many bike sheds are this color makes me think that people enjoy complaining about things more than they actually dislike the color.
I guess you would just have a new of tech news people and spam the news out to everyone at the same time. With any luck enough of them will invest enough time in it before they would have decided it was a waste of time.

If anything the embargo setup was probably stopping stories being written after people didn't trust it to stick.
Sleeping Barber discussion here:

http://bestinclass.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/scala-vs-clojure...

The spec is a bit vague, but quick 'n' dirty Erlang code here:

http://snipt.org/ngni
wow... that UI is rubbish compared to the Courier stuff. Oddly heartening to see that Microsoft can actually do decent UI when it sets its mind to it...
No worries - I was mostly being critical of the original article anyway.
Intel and the blame game
I'm typing on a Microsoft keyboard right now, the nth of many. Good stuff - works with OSX w/o custom drivers, including the volume up/down/mute - a nice touch!
You know what would be awesome? A list of tips for first-time business owners like, "don't spend too much on lawyers for incorporation", or "don't get ripped off on office space", or "know what kind of conversion rates to expect with different forms of outbound promo marketing".

You know what isn't very awesome? The list that contains "know what you know" and "focus!" and "stay healthy".

Why can't patio11 write one of these? It's bound to be better than this article.
> Any reputable designer will instantly recognize both

No one is asking about "reputable designers". The tiny minority of people who can recognize hundreds of fonts at a glance are not interesting when it comes to this question.

There are certainly some objective metrics you can consider. Some that very quickly come to my mind:

1) Effect on reading speed
2) Effect on reading "endurance" (a little harder to define, but reasonable)
3) Effect on recall of text (prose)
4) Effect on recall in advertisements
5) Distance at which text of a given size becomes readable

There's also softer stuff along the lines of "does it make you feel warm and fuzzy", and you can still design experiments for that type of thing too.

So, I'm sorry, but I just don't believe you went you say you can't measure any of this.
Sorry, updated headline.
I agree that this seems to mostly be serving TechCrunch's own interests.

However, is it really plausible for it to work any other way, in the end? Building plans around the voluntary cooperation of a bunch of people who would gain at least short-term benefit by defecting, combined with the "not getting the genie back in the bottle" nature of public information, is going to be an unstable equilibrium at best.

All it takes are one or two influental people who are willing to take the social reputation hit from not playing along to bring the whole thing down. If not TechCrunch, someone else eventually. Lamentable, yet likely inevitable.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837842
Precisely, and even if you do write it in a procedural fashion from that point forward you have the clutter of the OO code around it.

(It is of course not clutter if you are actually writing in an OO fashion where it makes sense and is very useful.)
Zoot-suited Zonkey
When health care reform passes he'll probably take credit for that too.
If there are .svn directories still present, it's likely that they just copied a working copy to their web server. You're supposed to use "svn export" to create a "production" version without the .svn directories. Or just delete them. Either way, this is really VCS misuse more than anything else.
Not sure what the quote has to do with your comment. In the post announcing the policy, Mike said that we would break all embargoes, save for some exceptions. It was purposely nebulous.
You have to get that durability somewhere.

Yes, and the message broker is pretty much the only place where it makes sense.

So, we're internalizing that queueing behavior into diesel.

An exercise in futility.

The main application dealing with the actual messages will still need to know which Diesel instance to talk to, in order to reach a particular subscriber.

How do you solve that?
You seem to be far more versed in the ways of 4chan. I have spent a few hours there a few times, long enough to understand the draw and that it wasn't for me, and I have several friends who spend time on the various boards there. Would you mind explaining a few things?

I've seen "chans" refer to several things, both the various boards (/b/, /g/, /r/ and the like), and referring to individual people. Which way are you using it, and why (as opposed to using it the other way)?

Peaked in size I understand that 4-chan servers tend to be very heavily trafficked, to the point that many people have said "DOS attack on 4chan? Is the internet on?" or something of similar meaning. Is this what you mean, or does it have to do with some kind of critical mass relation between Anonymous contributors and how much Original Content can be created/consumed (I would assume there is a peak point for that, although I don't have the slightest idea where that would be).

news ways to branch out I was under the impression that 4channers held a generally negative feeling for any other boards, tending to call them "imitators" and the like. What makes you think that a sufficiently interesting person could change that, considering the anonymous nature of 4chan (thus making it impossible for any person to actually back up how interesting they were, historically).

Back in the glory days I see this often, although it seems to be more a state of message boards in general than 4chan, although it does seem particularly loudly voiced on 4chan. Would you mind elaborating what those glory days were like, sense it certainly seems to me that some of the most impressive things to come out of 4chan have happened recently (Chanology, the Times poll rigging, and the like).

Sorry if I read too much into what you said. I've wanted to ask someone about their 4chan experiences for a while, but none of my friends want to admit to much, so I was hoping the semi-anonymity of HN would help a little.
Sorry for not responding for a long time. I didn't mean to be snarky above, sorry about that too.

I wrote a bit more here, but wasn't satisfied with how it went so its no more. It was anyways mainly about Sturmfels' programme of reasoning about graphical models with algebraic geometry and how I see it and less TO the paper, so it was probably unsubstantial not only badly written.

By this time I'm sure you already know what program of algebraic statistics is anyways and surely can judge it for yourself. This paper fits it and is not directly consumable by machine learning just yet. Other parts of AS are. To actually use either parts the book I mentioned is minimum anyways and will clarify alot. Even if summary of the paper or AS itself is to be presented to a prof, there is no way around this book. The shortest intro to AG is by M. Reid, it freely builds on commutative algebra (short intro on J.S. Milne page at jmilne.org) that builds on abstract algebra. I haven't read the new book by Sturmfels and Sullivant but I'm half-sure it just assumes AG nor doesn't explain statistics.
I can't wait for the publicity catfight that will ensue when Mac OS X 10.7 Lynx comes out and there's already an Ubuntu version with the same name. And a version number of the form 10.xx - this is just too good to be true.

Here's the status page which says that Apple used to have a trademark on 'Lynx' for 'Computer Operating System Software' but not anymore because they weren't doing anything with it:
http://tarr.uspto.gov/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78271639&...
Thanks! I'm excited to check out your product, regardless of your time frame. As I'm sure you know, I'll be doing more user testing down the road. This is just testing for our MVP.
Newly Declassified Files Detail Massive FBI Data-Mining Project
Would "What do you like to do?" be a better question?
Yeah it's OK for typesetting books but very verbose for chatting. Though if you need to chat about integrals and the like I guess you are stuck with it.
But you can test that shaving that 100ms off your website latency has a real impact on the user, because it can show up in your metrics.
As a hacker looking into fitness and taking up cycling recently to stave off health issues that become to interfere with my life and work, I can fully relate to this. The extent to which the pro cyclists and this guy in particular can push their bodies is fascinating. As far as I can understand, it is generally beneficial to health unless you push it to the over the edge, where the position of this edge is unknown to science.

Often times I come from work very exhausted, unable to do anything, including having a dinner, which my body needs, I think. If I reluctantly stuff some food into me and cycle for an hour or to, I become so invigorated that I seem to be able to keep going on and on: cycling, or coding - I can do it. The prudent thing here is have a proper dinner and sleep, I guess.

I was told that "marathoners go by the pulse meter" (i.e. not odometer/speedometer), I wonder how true is this for marathoners and for endurance cyclists. Maybe at the point in your training where you have personal trainer and follow car, you don't need pulse meter that much? I am never going to be there and I have high hopes for training with pulse meter.

Here's an obligatory video introduction to racing cycling culture:

MC SpandX "Perfomance"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn29DvMITu4
What's the clinical terminology for this? Projective collective delusional narcissism? I'm a Unix programmer, and I disavow this rant. Reading this makes me ashamed of every time I've thought and spoken this way. (At least I can thank the author for providing that clarity.) Unix programmers rarely tackle the kinds of problems that OO approaches are best and most necessary for. When they do, they usually aren't acting as "Unix programmers" or "systems programmers." I occasionally write performance-critical code that talks directly to hardware, and I have written embedded code that runs on that hardware as well. Of course I wrote lean code without layers of goopy abstraction. But I don't walk around with my chest puffed out just because I've written low-level non-OO code, because I've also written GUI applications using Eclipse RCP, which is plugin-based Java abstraction-on-steroids that makes architecture astronauts giddy. I would use Eclipse RCP again in a heartbeat if I needed to produce another heavyweight, complex GUI application. Looking down on somebody because the best way to do their job is not the best way to do your job is stupid.
Perhaps "OO Structure" or "OO Syntax" would have been a better choice of words. You can abuse java by declaring your class with a static main and then write things procedurally within that, but you have to have that class and its OO Structure.

In Python, that is not needed. Objects are there when they make sense(such as most gui design), but not required, even in structure or syntax, when they do not make sense.
How is it diagnosed? What are the usual measures one should take if he/she has one?
Homebrew is a new package management system for OS X based on git + ruby
_why had designed a similar metaweb a few years ago, where people could add and share comments to random pages, provided someone had created a URL(or a suitable regex)+xpath entry in the database, with the xpath pointing to the place where the comment box had to be inserted.

The barrier of entry was rather high, though. You had to tweak your DNS to point to his own server so that http://hoodwink.d would resolve to a server, then install a Mousehole script (Mh is a custom filtering proxy) or later a Greasemonkey script to make the comments and most of the hoodwink.d site appear.

The hoodwinkd sever refused to serve anything when not accessed throuh the proper URL, and the instructions to get there were intentionaly obscure (just a pair of semi-obfuscated IP adresses for he DNS servers and a few vaguely evocative lines about the concept).

I think you can still find the code at github.

Fun times.
Using subversion for deployment is a common practice. They should be blocking access to the .svn directories via web server configuration.
As Google Looks To Get On The Acquisition Track Again...
So . . . uhhh . . .

What is your suggested solution.

Or are you just telling us that we can never solve our problems, so we should just forget it?

No one here is suggesting that the solution rests with bettering the education of only minorities. Everyone who has made a suggestion, has put forth the idea that we need to better the education of EVERYONE. "Setting up kids early . . ." for this stuff is EXACTLY what everyone is suggesting.
Programming language popularity by various metrics
It's a very safe deployment environment because you can always switch to dedicated metal for the high performance parts. Shopify runs like this.
It's fun to hate Arrington and everything, but you are really grasping for straws here.
Someone's finally gone and written the package manager I've always wanted -- one that can just run in your home directory unprivileged and reuse most of the system packages. Also source-based and plays along with upstream by default!

I'd really love to see someone make this portable to other unixes -- it'd be lovely to finally have good package management for the ~/mine/bin dirs I have on servers everywhere (though a major complication is Debian's obnoxious segregation of headers into separate packages)
I first encountered the title phrase in comic strip Ozy and Millie, though I can't find the exact strip now.
I don't see why he would be. CoS's fair game tactics are pretty much identical to what 4chan griefers do to their targets for the lulz. The only difference is that the CoS can use lawsuits for harassment, while channers can't afford to do so.
I just find it very strange what the US puts up with in large part because they don't know any better. (Mind you, that probably extends much further than healthcare and much further than the US, but that's another article!)

There are many, many problems with our system here in Canada. There are many problems with EU systems as well, depending on where you go. The thing is that in 90% of all cases, the better deal on a per person basis is a form of socialized medicine. I just don't get how a large portion of the country seems not to understand this.
I get a Stand-Alone Complex feel out of them, only with less mystery as to the source of the memes. That concept is closest to capturing the way highly ordered things happen far out of proportion to any individual plan.

(I highly recommend Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It is one of the best near-future prediction shows I have ever seen, if not the best.)