skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the primary care outpatient business, and I support "Walmart medical care." (We call them "counter clinics.")

People who don't want expert medical advice go to the counter clinic, we don't have to serve resentful patients, and we can spend our time thinking about medicine with patients who appreciate our service.

Further, patients sometimes visit a counter clinic, but they have issues beyond what the counter clinic can handle. So, the counter clinic will refer the patient to us ---the medical doctors. One of our most regular patient referrals is corner CVS because the local medical doctors introduced themselves respectfully to the CVS clinic staff.

However, don't be fooled by the "cost cutting" nonsense. My estimation is that counter clinics increase total medical spending in the same way that shopping at Wal-Mart increases total consumer spending. Yes, each individual purchase of "health care" is moderately cheaper. However, given the lower prices, omnipresent availability, and cross-marketing of other products in the store, people do not simply buy the same things at a lower cost, they impulsively buy many smaller purchases of dubious value.

So, rather than visit an outpatient medical doctor for an hour for $500 (that is what we bill, though we usually only collect about $300 of that from insurance), one visits the Wal-Mart counter clinic for $70. That's a savings of $430, right? Maybe. Assume the counter clinic treated your sore throat, but you also had another issue, and later visited the medical doctor. Both issues could have been treated by the medical doctor for $500 now rather than $570 over several weeks. Oh, and you also bought "health supplements." Add another $30 recurring cost. Well, actually, you don't go to the doctor at all because you only have $500 for health care, and the doctor costs $500, but you only have $400 because you've already spend $100 on the counter clinic and supplements ---oops, actually, that $400 is already spent by your employer for health insurance.

So, you still pay, but you never visit a doctor, chronic heath conditions continue to exasperate, and in addition to suffering from chronic health problems, you eventually get very sick, progressively lose your ability to function, and are hospitalized sooner at a much higher cost.

Even a single day of missed work at $5 minimum wage due to illness not addressed by a counter clinic is quantitatively worth more than the $37 best case savings at the counter clinic. Primary and preventative care alternatives are almost never "cost savings" unless you know precisely otherwise.

By the way: there is some ludicrous cultural myth that exasperated health problems can be "fixed," or if you can just avoid "having a a serious problem" and "keep natural," you will be OK ---or at least, you can "fix" health "issues" "later."

No, you don't. You die.

Also, jeez, you spend so much time and money making your face and buying clothes, but when you have a disease, you're thinking about saving a few dozen dollars? Bleh.
It's obviously not a long-term plan, because even if the trees were not to die -- and decompose, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere -- we can only plant so many trees. On the other hand, it's really the best thing that we have going right now. Most other plans require the coordination of large groups of people that just don't care enough to do anything. On other words, it's nowhere near a silver bullet, but it's better than nothing.
Check out prezi.com.
A much better paradigm for presentations as they are non-sequential (or at least it doesn't have to be sequential).

It's flash based, so it is highly likely that anybody can view it, but it is probably best in the environment where you are controlling the presentation.
Many embedded platforms (the vector units on the PS2, several FP coprocessors in the ARM and MIPS world, etc) aren't (entirely) 754-compatible. Since these are commonly cross-compiled, you can easily run into issues.
An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
This is the final draft based on the original Hacker News thread and conversation about a month ago.
I suppose this means Daily Booth isn't looking for any more angel investment at this stage?
Understood. There just seem to be a lot of complaints that the system he used for benchmarking didn't have epoll and that Tornado was slow because of select. I agree. But Erlang on that machine obviously didn't use epoll either.
They will be the Wal-Mart of the web when they start throwing their weight around and 'holding wholesalers hostage' to drive down prices, forcing manufacturers to make 'cheaper' versions of the same product just for Amazon (and in some cases listing that 'Amazon-version' with the cheaper parts/build quality as the exact same model as the ones that were sent to other retailers).
Because a tampon stops the flow.
Unfortunately the government when selling new spectrum also sold large amounts of it to the existing incumbents. The prices are so high here that the incumbents shouldn't have had a chance to bid. Canada is among the highest in mobile rates in the Western world. Here's hoping Globalive will shake things up.
I've had the exact same problem for years and after much fiddling around I too recommend vitamin D3. it's the same as produced by the body from sunlight. eat more fruits and vegetables. maybe take a multivitamin and fish oil daily. exercise regularly. and get enough sleep FOR YOU. some people need more than others.

I don't think it's any surprise that people are much less sick in the summer. People are in the sun much more in summer and hence have higher levels of vitamin D in their blood stream.

I personally feel that sufficient vitamin C and zinc (for men especially) are also important. But taking D3 at 2000-5000 daily is perfectly safe and certainly beneficial.

Why else would your body produce after exposure to UV radiation?
There many attempts to get proofs for compilers for popular languages, C or Ada for example:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1315602
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/compiler-certif.pdf
Exactly! And the real issues are that our society isn't concerned with producing bright scientists, engineers, and researchers. They are concerned with producing more pop stars, tv stars, athletes, etc...

The inventors, innovators, and scientists have made life so easy, we've forgotten how necessary they are to provide us with the life we live. I'd say the intellectual contributors to life improve it immeasurably more than a basketball star, but the admiration is completely flipped.

When China and India become the super powers through a direct concentration on study, science and technology and we are left in the dust the equation will flip again. It was the space race and the cold war that made scientists sexy and we'll get back there when we realize we are not so powerful anymore.

The founder visa concept is just a band-aid. It's a farce. It's a ruse created by investors to give themselves more power and opportunities to fund companies, but I don't really see a lot of positive benefit to society coming out of the companies I'm seeing funded lately.

Most of the startups that have been promoted since the web 2.0 fiasco are pretty stupid ideas really and if they do succeed we will continue to be worse off as a nation. Ad networks? Upload a photo today? Show my location 24/7? 140 character messages? Really people? Is that the direction we want to take our country? We need more visas for that nonsense?

I don't think so.
Phony.

Even francophone programmers switch to English among themselves in technical speech; perhaps subconsciously, call it technical diglossia if you want.

You wanna appear sophisticated? s/french/mathematics/, but learn it well and back your words up with knowledge, not parroting technical lingo and hoping no one notices you're full of it.
Yes, I'm aware. However, like most such things, they're simply not practical. Proving compiler correctness is insanely difficult (if it wasn't, we'd have much better compilers) and it very frequently ignores optimization entirely, making such compilers useless.

In theory, proving correctness is a good way to go. In the real world, it's not remotely viable.
I'm glad someone said this. I, like I'm sure a lot of people here, have a tremendous amount of respect for Paul Graham. So I really couldn't bring myself to write a formal critique of this piece. But it's just a complete mis-fire and this article (along with the one linked to in the update) go a long way to showing why.

Anyway, thoughts should be up for critique no matter how respected the person is who offers them so I'm glad someone jumped to the critique when others (myself included) didn't.
The Cell's SPEs aren't fully IEEE 754 compatible. Some GPUs may not be.
Compiler written in python, ruby and other "slow" .. languages going to take eternity to compile linux kernel.

What makes you think everyone is out to write a C compiler?
They're both a stretch.

Hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liviu_Librescu

Hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Autrey

MIT dome hackers: not heroes.

ASU football players: not heroes.
I saw somewhere that adult content drives a ton of traffic to tumblr. I know ning had some issues with this.

I'd be curious to see if this happens to dailybooth.

(I'm not completely crazy: http://dailybooth.com/ashh)
ICFP 2009 Presentation Videos
Goooo Shriram!
Actually, it is precisely the experimentation / hunch-following times where I've found the biggest productivity gains -- bouncing ideas around with another smart and creative person is a lot more stimulating and effective than the code - compile -check loop!
No, it doesn't combust. If you remember, animals exhale CO2. The tree becomes detritus, which gets consumed by detritovores (such as cockroaches), which convert it into CO2.
I have to disagree with this. I think this is an industry that is ready for hackers to make a difference.

Many of you are very familiar with the technology that is in place in medical record systems, actually you will find the technology laughable. A technology upgrade would create a major improvement for healthcare systems.

The healthcare system in this country HAS to change. It is not a question or else it will bankrupt our country. If healthcare is not in need of quality hackers I don't know what is.
I think you may have misinterpreted the point the parent was making -- some of us have families where the elderly leave wealth to the next generation when they pass on.
High Profile HN user, not basecamp user, just to clarify.
I have to say that I'm a little bit turned off by the fact that this comment went negative. Not to pull "authority" on all of you, but I'm a graduate student who teaches introductory classes on ecology. This week we're actually teaching this material, and part of what we're teaching is exactly what I said in this comment. The burning of fossil fuels is especially problematic because fossils are a long term sink. Sequestering it in organic material is an extremely temporary (by comparison) solution.

I could have gone off on how planting trees barely deals with the quantity, but the essential difference between long term storage in fossils and short term storage in organic material is often missed, and I thought it might be interesting to call this to the attention of HNers. However, apparently I lose karma points for this instead.
A couple of my favorites so far:

http://www.vimeo.com/6571637 - Haskell Arrays on GPGPU

http://www.vimeo.com/6629455 - Partial Memoization of Concurrency

http://www.vimeo.com/6624203 - Guy Steele's talk (slides for this were on HN a week or so ago)
This also assumes trees are a one-off thing. As far as I know, trees tend to reproduce, and during their lives have a habit of creating more, new trees.

I would really like to see government funded sustainable farming initiatives. Some sort of plan which involves creating sustainable (meaning cycling crops over the course of several years, long term plans that create soil that is fertile and usable to continue growing in, and the like) farms, with the intent that they be at least somewhat self-sufficient. I don't know the logistics behind it, but I would think it should be more than possible for large scale, self sufficient farms, using environmentally helpful methods, and planting things that aren't necessarily selected for maximum yield, but for maximizing the (positive) impact on the surrounding environment.
This looks very awesome; Is anyone running it?
Literally everything? Is Amazon selling any type of food? In any event, I don't think they're working with fresh (or even frozen) food anytime soon.

An idea that I've been thinking about for a while is an Amazon for perishable commodities. At least here in Western Europe, fresh produce has ridiculous markups. It seems obvious that producers and consumers get abused by distributors. I have the feeling that there's an opportunity in delivering to the customer's home, offering competitive prices in exchange for predictability (repeat orders, preorders, orders with flexible delivery dates, machine learned purchase patterns) that would let one move high volumes without keeping much stock.

To begin with one could focus on organic produce, which (again, in my area) has trouble finding shelf space.

I haven't discarded this idea yet, but I wouldn't mind if someone out there gave it a go first :).
Also, this:

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/planting-trees-will-not-cancel...
Its not the content, but the ways its presented that got the downvotes (I would assume). The presentation borders on saying "Don't plant trees, it doesn't help the environment (in the long run)". Yes, you're right, but it is similar to saying:

Sadly, using solar power does little to help with the global warming problem. The Sun is only a temporary power source; as soon as the hydrogen runs out it will stop supplying energy to the Earth. Since we use energy, what we really need to do to stop using as much energy. Sadly, this takes a really long time, and is really hard.

Hell, you even mention "what we really need to do to restore the carbon cycle is put the carbon back into fossils". How exactly do you propose doing that, other than creating something which fossilizes, like trees?
http://www.amazon.com/grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic...
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Organic-Grocery/b/ref=sd_allca...
http://www.amazon.com/gourmet-food-gifts-chocolate-seafood/b...

The above links go to the Grocery, Natural + Organic, and Gourmet Foods departments at Amazon. These mostly sell non-perishable items, but do include some frozen foods.

http://fresh.amazon.com/

Amazon Fresh is a pilot program, currently in the Seattle area only. It features just about everything you can get at a grocery store, plus a partial selection of items from regular Amazon departments (books, music, electronics, etc.). A lot of companies went bankrupt trying to do this; Amazon seems to be taking baby steps to make sure it can be profitable.
McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player
I was reading that the worst problem of C++ is to decide what 10% of the language to use in your project. Google is trying to do this to avoid such conflicts.
I'm not entirely sold on Graham's original point nor the author's rebuttal, but the piece has got a couple pretty big hypocrisies. For instance, both from the piece:

> Calling the NYT "a printout of yesterday's news" is snotty and snarky, to be sure, but it's also inaccurate.

> Graham needs some elementary economics and business instruction.

Like, calling out a multimillionaire technological innovator/investor on being "snotty and snarky", then quipping (snottily and snarkily) that he needs "elementary economics and business instruction" - okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness.
Learn more about scalablity
I really appreciate how the article ends by saying that the author agrees with Paul's main conclusions, but that the author disagrees with the arguments being made. That's largely how I felt after reading Paul's essay too, but I couldn't have articulated it as well.
Mars and the Moon? In a few months NASA won't even be able to send a man into space, let alone the moon.

Sad really.
I don't think that the Founder's Visa is ruse. I think it's a not particularly well-thought-out idea that resonates with the start-up community because it seems to address some problems and, even-more, seems to validate the identity 'Founder' as something worthwhile.

I do think that start-ups provide something of worth to society. However, I think it's a problem when public policy starts to be about massaging some groups identity.
So in which (human) languages do programmers (a) entirely use their own languages with its own native technical terms; (b) drop English terminology into sentences in their own languages; (c) switch entirely to English when talking about programming?

My one data point of amusement: I once worked in Hong Kong (a Cantonese-speaking city) with a team which had outsourced part of its project to Shenzhen (a Mandarin-speaking city). In HK Cantonese, people usually use Cantonese words for simpler technical terms like "web page" or "hard disk", but more complex ones like "dual boot" or "buffer overflow" would be in English. In Mandarin, and also Cantonese as spoken in the mainland, they use almost entirely Chinese terms ... or at least a lot higher proportion than in HK Cantonese. (A lot of those terms, of course, are just calques from English).

Now, the HK guys could speak passable Mandarin, and some of the Shenzhen guys could speak okay Cantonese (though not much English). So if the two groups were talking about what to have for lunch, or about football, or whatever, they could go on for hours. Once it came around to work-related topics, though, the conversation slowed down to a crawl while the HKers tried to grok the mainland-style technical terms. Us foreigners always made fun of them for being unable to understand their own mother tongue.

I'm told an analogous situation exists among Hindi & Urdu speakers? Basic conversation is fine, but when you get into highly academic topics, one group apparently starts using Perso-Arabic words and the other group starts using Sanskrit words and communication all goes pear-shaped.
i don't know how true it is, but i loved the story.

at first the statements seem random, or rather i didn't find any emotional meaning to them.

then i felt warmth and comfort. the trees and forests grow back. maybe humans haven't damaged the earth beyond repair.

finally, the timeline expands beyond human significance. that's beautiful.

nicely done with the mouseovers, too.
They use 2 spaces for C++ and ObjC, 4 spaces for Python.
werd - this is a great opportunity for hackers, and the amount of money at stake here is huge.

Of course, that's not what the article is about, but I completely agree.
Health care is fixed easily with money, which investors have. Visas are not as easy, so they're a bigger problem.
The SSA has a rather nice refutation of the claim that there's any real analogy between Ponzi schemes and Social Security:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041001-20051231re_/http://www.s...
To put that in perspective: The daily wage for planting trees is roughly $2 US. Or that vegetables are ~$0.70 per day.

It slightly unfortunate, but I doubt it could scale to work in the US. That would come out to paying each individual ~ $30 per day (guessing that an equivelant amount of vegetables would be roughly $5 per day, not based on any hard numbers), so this project would cost some place in the range of $1 million per day, before any kind of overhead, just for paying all of the people.
Kim Stanley Robinson slams Booker Prize judges' sci-fi ignorance
Some trees last hundreds of years. I think that gives us enough time to figure out how to efficiently make diamonds out of CO2. Or something.
very nice poem. probably doesn't belong on hn, but i'm glad i happened upon this little gem.
Most of Greenspun's writings are exemplary
http://philip.greenspun.com/site-history
"code - compile - check" - I'm assuming that you are talking about coding/algorithm bugs.

What I'm saying is, lets say you want to find a way to update a web page with live data(http push?). Then you do a brainstorming session with others and get some ideas(comet, bosh, xmpp, etc). If you want to see which technology fits your product most, then it would be a good idea that each person is spending time on different ideas.

"brainstorming" is completely different from "coding together", specially coding a hack.
Whoa there. I brought up the tourist visa as an obvious way to enter the country and then work illegally, to answer the bogus objection that a founders' visa would lead to more illegals stealing American jobs: all that would be is an expensive and convoluted way to do what anyone willing to break that law can already do cheaply and trivially right now. And it wouldn't even work as well, since your name would be associated with the company you'd "founded", leaving a trail that the other method wouldn't.

Edit: I suppose I should mention that no, I am not condoning anyone who enters a country on a tourist visa and works illegally.
You can do that Mechanical Turk. But yes, Outsourcing can do those tasks pretty easily. But outsourcing can also be plenty tricky. Its a back woods affair, its the wild wild west of development.
The Professional Twitter Client
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU)
Capital available in $200,000 chunks would be an interesting world:

1) You'd presumably want to make the offering mass-customizable, like a typical residential mortgage. There are a few levers to play with, sure, by 98% of the contract got vetted by the company lawyers once as being Good Enough and folks can take it or they can leave it. This allows you to close deals quickly, avoid spending much time teaching buyers about your process, and have the deals offered by junior staff. Most home buyers want a house, they don't want a mortgage. Most startup founders have a business to have a business, not to raise capital.

(Note that this would make "comparison shopping" easy.)

2) Automate and outsource more of the process. Banks can profitably do loans for $200,000 houses because there is an infrastructure of people who can say "Yep, this is a $200k house" and FICO scores, which let you push a button and get a quick estimate of my propensity to default in a second. I know we all think we're beautiful snowflakes, but I'm willing to bet there is a function which can be evaluated cheaply that is unfair, misses all sorts of edge cases, has numerous theoretical problems, and nonetheless is Good Enough when only $200k is at stake.

3) As you reduce the amount of marginal effort in each deal, it becomes possible to scale it to the moon, in a manner similar to e.g. mortgages and mutual funds. (The fund has a lot of money, the individual investors have comparitively little money and reduced exposure to any single investment, etc.)
I read through the article but could not get the roots of "shrinking venture market" problem. Can someone please summarize/provide better explaination ?