skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that not only was this unethical, but also not a valid contract. Without some reasonable semblance of an agreement how can someone say that you owe them $117,000? I would bet that a court would disagree and would be interested to hear why.
How is this any different from telling your boss to go fuck him/herself? Many small businesses depend on one or two big clients for their livelihood.
A burning desire not to work for anyone else.

Thing is, you're always working for someone else. A boss, a customer, an investor etc.

As far as I'm concerned the only really good reason to do your own thing is that you get to choose what to work on, provided what you want to work on is actually financially viable.
I had a recurrence of a medical complaint and have a high deductible insurance. I called around to several odficesbro find out what it would cost to treat if I was correct that it was a recurrence. In every case it took 30 minutes or longer for them to decipher their own costs.
I honestly can't tell if your comment is satire. We know from looking at other countries what a functional and effective health care system looks like. You're suggesting we do the opposite. It's almost beyond belief.
I drink occasionally, at most two drinks (half Vietnamese; I fall asleep if I drink more). On average maybe one drink every two weeks. I've recently gone low carb, so even less moving forward.

The most alcoholic work environment I've known was Andersen Consulting. We had a well stocked open bar made available for every after hours gathering, including training. I started drinking Scotch because I hate Scotch, no-one seems to think less of someone who asks for Scotch, and could nurse a glass for an evening without a problem.
Are you referring to single payer system?
Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?
Show HN: Instagram to Evernote
While I think the subscription idea has some merit it's hardly "one and only way of solving this problem".

I could maybe believe "one and only way of solving this problem without challenging preconceptions and accepting some nuance into free market ideology".
Microsoft drops developer annual fee, saves you some cheddar
> Government has meddled in this industry and even with the ideas that the typical Americans think about for so long that this was inevitable. Nor can government fix it now...

I disagree with you 100%, and halfway think you're joking. This is one area where more government is the clear answer. How many other countries have to set a working precedent?

You seem to make this out to be an outcome of "borderline fraudulent" doctors. That you'd call out "every doctor" as committing borderline fraud shows your lack of understanding for the system as a whole, much less nuance. Do you think the high price is because doctors are looking to make enormous profits? I'm sure that's true for some, but in general that just is not the case. Who percentage of doctors do you think get fabulously wealthy, anyway? Most do fine, but after student loans are factored in it isn't the key to wealth that you think.

The high price is driven by many things, and you've focused on the one of the smallest. Your proposal is chaos, and it would turn healthcare into even more of a privilege for the wealthy than it is now (nevermind for the moment the unpredictably of care pathways that cannot be agreed to upfront).
I have been using the little memory for this and it is great. Automatically exports to text files on Dropbox or Google Drive too.

https://thelittlememory.com
Pointless extra API layers is why our software is slow.

What is the reasoning for this except "simple access"? It's not simple when it adds another API on top of an already existing one, that it needs to be kept in sync with. If Android cannot use the normal binary API (which is nowdays pretty secure, compact, bug-free), then Android needs to be fixed.
BitTorrent magnet links already kind of do this.

Theoretically speaking, isn't it possible to create a virtual BitTorrent FUSE filesystem?
A start-up I applied for once asked me to take a test, and one of the problems was "Implement a sorting algorithm that is not O(n^2)." I thought about snarkily adding extra walks through the data, but decided instead to explain the problem with the question and answer the question they were trying to ask.
I happen to agree that market intervention is necessary but immediately poking fun at libertarians is ridiculous. The healthcare in the US is nothing like a "free market." It is the worst of all worlds - corrupt intervention that enriches corporations. It is the new age of American crony capitalism.
This article reminds me strongly of a pivotal passage in the novel Gain, by Richard Powers (which I can't recommend highly enough, although it's a downer). In that passage he describes how a disposable film camera is made.
We regularly perform PDF extractions at my startup. For each new client, we'll run batches of several thousand at a time.

A more attractive monetization model for a customer like us would be $0.01-0.03/conversion ($100-$300 per 10,000). A low per-conversion cost would easily allow us to test for a given group of PDFs if the conversion service was a good candidate for that batch, and if not, chose an alternative up-front (but allow us to test again the next batch easily at low cost). Also with a low start-up cost, its much easier to tell customers you won't make any specific fixes (take it or leave it, and test it first). Then you'd have the flexibility to work on broad classes of problems/improvements more at your leisure.
If you want to fix this (and every other problem), the answer is simple (though not particularly libertarian): outlaw all health insurance. Make everyone pay for their own care. Make them pay out of pocket.

In such a nation at that, none of these shenanigans could continue. Not that I expect anyone reading this to get it. You cry "But NoMoreNicksLeft, how could that man afford $117,000 out of pocket!"

And the poor couldn't afford healthcare anymore. Even if it is a well-justified $10,000 surgery. Most people cannot pay this out of their pocket.

In the Western European countries where healthcare does actually work and is affordable for everyone, it is strongly regulated and continually fine-tuned to find and eliminate spots where the system is abused. E.g. for years in the Netherlands doctors would prefer some expensive medicines when there are cheap alternatives, because their manufacturer gave them nice bonuses. The state outlawed such practices. Moreover, in cases where it is shown that there are medicines from different manufacturers with an equal amount of relevant substances, insurance companies now only prescribe the most affordable one.

Anyway, I have lived in two countries where there is strongly government regulated healthcare (The Netherlands and Germany) and never had any qualms about the systems. I have also seen people close to me with small health problems to various forms of cancer, and for no one this was ever a financial problem. Luckily.
> The function get_input_string returns a temporary string, and tokenize_string2 builds an array of pointers into that string. Unfortunately, the temporary string only lives until the end of the current expression, and then the underlying memory is released. And so all our pointers in v now point into oblivion

So what stops you from returning a shared pointer in case of get_input_string? Then take over that ownership and use it. It's still a potential problem that v is logically disconnected from lifetime of that pointer, but at least you could avoid the problem you described.
> this is not about nicer online forms. This is about destroying this.

Thank you for clarifying this.
Joan Pujol Garcia
Internet Population and Penetration
Neal Stephenson’s failed $500,000 video game and the perils of using Kickstarter
How Your Startup Can Strategically Use Luck to Its Advantage
> But again, this is lost on anyone I've ever explained it to

Have you considered the possibility that you aren't explaining it very well?

Have you considered the possibility that it's not a very good idea?
If you have the means already yes the legal system is in place if not you are out of luck.

I was at one point presented with the option of either paying between 30-150.000USD for having a stage one melanoma removed or wait a year until the pre-existing condition clause was canceled out.

Luckily I found another way but I have the resources to do so and I almost got screwed both financially and literally.

What I don't understand is why the US doesn't adopt something like in Switzerland which have universal healthcare but it's privately insured. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Switzerland
Intern 2.1 released: make the Intern do the testing
Exactly! More importantly, those who can't spell yet.

A year ago I showed my kid (then 5) Google voice search on iPad. Her eyes lit up and off she went on Youtube and later Google search itself... First obscure animals - obscure to me, but apparently mentioned on 'Wild Kratz' and other animal shows - Then stuff she heard about on'Magic Schoolbus' and Brainpop.

Judging from what she's been showing me, it works for song titles and lyrics as well, and she loves the voice search interface on our Amazon FireTV as well.

As a result, I find myself using it more often. I love it on the FireTV. If I had a single button for picture search on my Sammy, like the Amazon Fire Phone has, I'd use that too.

I will show her picture search tomorrow. Can't believe I forgot that.

Edit: after reading the article, one more important group comes to mind: those for whom English is not their first language. Calling my parents tomorrow.
What law does it break to threaten legal action to enforce a patent granted to you by the USPTO?

It sounds like you don't like what you see, and you want to find something in the law to use against them. But lots of smart people have looked and nobody has found anything, so it's probably not there. The correct solution is to change the law, not to use overly broad interpretations.
Yes, but it's Libertarians like the Koch brothers who have done the most damage to the prospect for improved healthcare in recent years.

Also, you can make the argument that free markets over time tend toward cronyism and corporate welfare. That's what happens when there are no checks on the power of corporations and no limits on how money can influence politics.
It should be cheap during the years there is a lot of it, but perhaps not during drought years.
In the header of the article, it mentioned he signed many forms. Probably one of them agreed to this practice. Enforcement could still be tough though.
JustWriting: Dropbox Markdown Blogging System
AngularJs wrapper for Ziggeo
OhLife Founders,

You have a habit-forming business. I'm dependent on this and worked it into my daily rituals.

I would have gladly payed money to continue using this service.

Why was this model not experimented with, before deeming your venture "not financially stable"?

Thanks for the memories.
I love this service. Sorry to hear about that. Hopefully, alternative one will be as good as OhLife.
I'm not sure, but perhaps the reference is to comments on Hacker News in general, rather than on this page in particular?
For the record, I consider myself somewhat of a libertarian. I just find it ridiculous when some self-proclaimed libertarians refuse to see past their rigid ideology on certain issues, of which health care is one of the most obvious. Free markets work great when they work, but they cannot be relied upon to achieve social aims that are inherently collectivized.

Hard-core communists are just as silly.
Warehouse (pypi.python.org) – the next generation Python Package Repository
As somebody who has lived all but about 4 years of his life in the Central Valley, it sure feels like a desert in the summer time (and late spring, and early fall) any where there is not active irrigation.

True, it's not Mojave or the Sahara, but it's pretty hot and dry. Savanna a la Africa is not a bad comparison.
A past entry would be awesome to have. I actually never knew about the attach a picture feature until after OhLife got shut down, so I personally don't care too much about that. More importantly, in general the UI could use a facelift. It's not bad after you've already created a question but the form of question generation isn't really easy to follow at all. Also, as others have suggested, export of OhLife data would be awesome.
Play Rock Songs with an iPhone Guitar App – “HIGHWAY GUITAR” and It's FREE Now
Ello: an ad-free social network
6 months and the status of convicted felon. This is not an easy thing to take.
Would it be possible to run this under Windows? :o
So, USPTO grants an invalid patent, and patent troll uses it to shake down whoever they wish? I surely think it's illegal. If there is no law which makes it so, there should be one. I'd say even if the patent is valid, one can't use shakedown methods like "pay up or else".

Patent trolls even big ones like Microsoft for example use intimidation to squeeze money. Their tactic is clearly to use high cost of litigation to force everyone to settle outside of court. I.e. it can go like this. A troll comes to some company and says: "Nice business you have here, it would be a pity if anything happens to it. Pay up or else". Company answers: "We'll fight to invalidate your patents". Troll says: "So what, we have tons more we can pull out, you don't have money to fight to invalidate them all, so better pay up". Whether they are valid or not such practice should be illegal because it's not any different than criminal shakedown.

>It sounds like you don't like what you see, and you want to find something in the law to use against them.

Indeed. I'd prefer them to be persecuted as racketeers, because they are such. I agree that if the law doesn't cover such case it should be fixed.
Ah, ok, thanks.
If it was two weeks notice of actually shutting down the service that's alright, but deleting all past entries in two weeks is way too short.
I would also like an Ohlife import service (or any other API that could be used for importing).
Healthcare didn't voluntarily turn away from a market approach. The US Government invaded the industry in a massive way and began manipulating and regulating it from top to bottom. That has only gotten worse over time.
If the patent was invalid for reasons known to the people threatening action, then I think it's reasonable to at least be called fraud. If they were (or might've been) operating under the belief that the patent was legit - and certainly granting by the USPTO would dispose one to this belief, if there wasn't some reason they knew better - then I think it's as you say.
Is software engineering really a discipline uniquely filled with constant learning, changing, etc.? I imagine many jobs have an element of this. Software engineers keep learning new things about software engineering as the discipline evolves. Civil engineers keep learning new things about civil engineering as the discipline evolves. And so on...

...but the constant learning, changing, etc., is only tied to the demands of that particular job. Whereas in adolescence, not tied to any particular job as a set identity (and with free time on a level no longer available once one must take up a full-time job), one may frequently be exploring whole new topics of interest, developing breadth and not just depth.
If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM
Italian Company Agrees to Pay $100,000 for Unlawful Technology Export to Syria
“They showed intense dedication and dogged focus that I think most of our backers would find moving if the whole story were told,” Stephenson said.

Then tell it. You at least owe the backers that. If you crowdfund and fail and then don't tell your backers why "because secretz and IPz", you have completely missed the spirit of crowdfunding.
Looks a bit like Quartz Composer although I've never actually used it.
He shouldn't have repeatedly broken the law if he wasn't prepared to deal with the legal consequences.
Thanks for your detailed response.

The good news with ARIA is that the documentation for ultra-popular Bootstrap 3 includes ARIA support. That's one of the reasons I asked the HTML5 question.

Also, reading your post inspired me to see what's out there for Bootstrap, and I found a very cool toolkit from Paypal[1] that makes Bootstrap's accessibility even better.

Good point about non-native toolkits, although in this day and age using anything other than Qt is extremely painful unless you're targeting a single platform. As popular as Qt is, some association for visually impaired people should take that up as a challenge. I do seem to recall that Qt5 has made some major progress in terms of accessibility, and also that many of their official guides address the issue explicitly.

1. https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/01/28/bootstrap-acce...
So how come this doesn't work for me? I am not influenced by advertising in the least. I find it all equally annoying.

I'm not being pretentious, but when I look at the stuff I buy (and I'm as materialistic as the next person, slightly obsessed with 'design', and attached to a brand like Apple), none of it I've seen in ads.

Advertising uniformly has the effect of pissing me off and can even turn me off brands. And I'm not a unique snowflake, my wife is exactly the same.

I honestly cannot fathom why any intelligent human being would be influenced by something as unsubtle and obvious as advertising.
Off Canvas Menu Effect
By the way, in xUSSR free healthcare system multiple doctors _often_ discuss serious cases, unlike US. That's not something special for xUSSR doctors to discuss in a concilium complicated cases -- that's daily routine. That's their way to share expertise and improve professionally. In US you may have some chronic disease and one doctor would treat you as she/he believes is right, not discussing it with colleagues, and if you find another doctor, he/she might change the treatment, not even talking with previous doctor.

So it's kinda strange to hear from famous US people that they "found an awesome doctor". I would prefer to find an awesome clinic, and have multiple doctors to discuss my case. That happens, of course, but money keeps that from being natural routine here.
Nothing is a market until you make it a market. All markets are artificial: they require the government to recognize and legitimate property rights in a particular good and therefore allow the market in that good to be governed by the rule of law.

I was a promoter of cap-and-trade for a long time, but the data, which I cited in my original post, suggest that straight carbon taxes work better. They are simpler to implement and demonstrably effective, and allow the reduction of income taxes and corporate taxes.

Am I correct in assuming you are in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes? This seems odd to me: I think it makes more sense to tax things we don't want (dumping gigatonnes of garbage into the atmosphere) and lower taxes on things we do want (people making oodles of money.)

The claim that you can't expect emissions reductions from carbon taxes is simply false, on the data. I believe in the data. Why should I believe an unsubstantiated claim to the contrary?
+1 for ssl2buy. Bought a wildcard cert[1] from them for a special price.

[1] https://www.ssl2buy.com/ssl-discount-offers
"And the poor couldn't afford healthcare anymore. Even if it is a well-justified $10,000 surgery. Most people cannot pay this out of their pocket."

A free market healthcare system assumes people would be getting back at least 7.5% of their salary every year, if not more.

"Anyway, I have lived in two countries where there is strongly government regulated healthcare (The Netherlands and Germany) and never had any qualms about the systems. I have also seen people close to me with small health problems to various forms of cancer, and for no one this was ever a financial problem. Luckily."

As someone who has sold both pharmaceuticals and medical devices to European hospitals/health agencies, I can tell you that the dirty secret behind all fully socialized systems is rationing. There is literally a quota of, say pacemakers, for example, that can be purchased in Germany every year.
Entrepreneurship is hard and I know it from experience, but have you ever taken care of someone 24 hours a day? An alzheimers patient or a developmentally disabled child?

My dad has AD and I'm his primary caregiver and compared to caregiving, entrepreneurship with all its pain is literally a fucking joy. Happiest part of my day even when making $0. I've failed at entprenreurship badly for a 2+ years but psychologically I have none of the pain associated with it because I know how much harder life can be.

Don't get me wrong, if I had the chance I would walk away from both but once you've experienced the toll of careigvng, you quit complaining about how hard entrepreneurship is.

I sometimes think that all wannabe entrepreneurs should work as a fulltime caregiver at an old age home or childrens ward at a hospital for 2 weeks. It would lessen the "pain" of entrepreneurship 10 fold.

That would reframe a lot of the pain away and help you focus on what needs to be done to market/sell a product and build it.

The truth is that the "pain" is 100% psychological and most children bought up in middle class and above families have never experienced what it means to have nothing.

Entrepreneurs who have grown up poor don't even understand what I'm talking about when I try to explain this concept.

So volunteer in the peace corps and it'll take away 100% of the pain of entrepreneurship and help you focus on executing.
>* Learn to use a screenreader and just play with your app/website.

Excellent advice. I'll start testing my sites with a screenreader in addition to IE8 and all other other usual suspects. I also just found a cool toolkit for Bootstrap 3 (I use Bootstrap a lot):

https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/01/28/bootstrap-acce...
A Statistical Appreciation of Li Na
Amen. The collective argument behind our current system forgets the history, namely that our current backasswards way of paying for healthcare originates with a reaction to wage controls during WW2.
Take control of your web
Jane is a deliberate play on this. The reason Jane is a secret in Speaker for the Dead is because she knows that artificial intelligences in our literature are always evil and she believes humans would declare war on her if she were known to exist. She only trusts Ender because of the Hive Queen and The Hegemon.
This idea of searching by speech or images seems ... uninspired. Claiming the interface will change and we'll search by speech or images is a linear progression from text searching.

How about framing the problem as proactive vs reactive searches? Piece together enough fragmented data about me to know what song I'll have stuck in my head and don't know the name of, recognize my email contains a course syllabus and auto-populate my calendar with assignments and study times... a million other proactive tasks all done with me in mind.

Geez these guys are talking about changing the interface... try and get rid of the interface all together!
Yes. Briefly. Then I realized that there is no way to explain calculus to a chimp.
Thinking advertising annoys you doesn't mean it doesn't influence you. In fact it probably influences you more then you think - you dwell on it. You think why it annoys you. But at the end of the day "buy Coca-Cola!" was still the last message in your head and you probably spent more time thinking about it.

There was a McDonalds ad on the radio a while back which had a combination of, not unpleasant but slightly annoyingly pronounced voices talking about their breakfast menu. I couldn't stand it. Tended to switch the radio off when it came on. And yet here I am, years later, telling you exactly which brand it was advertising and what it was advertising.