skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cross-state insurance seems like such an obvious proxy for insurance de-regulation that I'm surprised its advocates don't just come out and say it: "we should work with the minimum possible regulation on insurance companies".

I'm wholly ambivalent about whether states or the federal government should operate the government-sponsored risk pool.

You already know where this discussion is going to go with me, so think about whether you want to wade into it. Pick your poison: government by the Government, or government by the insurance companies. I'm not wild about what the federal government is coming up with (though not because of the mandate, which seems sensible), but the major insurance companies are both inept and actively evil, and the system we have today is rigged to favor them decisively whether we regulate or not.
No basic fact checking? That sounds just like the regular news; just ask Rush Limbaugh (victim of a fake quote, which the media just accepted without fact checking).
While I think he has a point worth making, it seems hurried under volumes of copius douchebaggery.

To give just one example, his trivialization of the role of social media in Iran in service of making his own point.

And frankly, "pro" journalists often bring many of the same failings. The report,rather than compromising their objectivity by actually helping, they get things wrong when news is unfolding. They are driven by ego and seduced by power. But really, the failings of pro journalism aren't news, and at this point, nor are the failings of bloggers, so here we are, rehashing the same damn story, applying the same damn narrative, only this time, it's a blogger lookin down his nose at a Tweeter.
How to lose weight:

1. Eat clean

2. Eat less calories

3. Burn more calories

Exercise alone will not help you lose weight if you are eating bad foods. Your diet is 70% of losing body fat. Burning calories will get you to your goal much faster.
Worse , the bulk of debate is focused on how to shift responsibility for covering that $3K/day rather than figuring out why is costs that much and how to make it cost less.
I disagree with your first point. You can eat nothing but refined sugar, and as long as you expend more energy than you consume you will lose weight.
Nicely done on a Saturday night.

Dems must be proud of their work.
This article is so stupid it makes me angry.

What's is Mr. Carr's point? That people who report the news are sometimes doing it for the sake of their own aggrandizement rather than pure altruism? Then why is there a byline link on your post, Mr. Carr? Why do you draw a salary as a journalist?

Is this something new? I remember CNN journalists covering Katrina visibly preening themselves as they got more and more worked up about what a tragedy it was, and what good work they were doing by reporting it. The anchors who kicked off the 9/11 reporting knew that not only were they covering a world-changing event, but a career-changing one for them. To be a journalist is to have this conflict of interest.

The fact that it happens on Twitter and other social media too, when the journalists are amateurs, is completely and utterly irrelevant. What happens in real life happens online too. It seems this keeps taking journalists by surprise, who then report it as if it's a breakthrough. Shopping - online! Dating - online! Child molestation - online! Bullying - online! Support groups - online!

But of course my posting this is obviously fatally compromised because, as Mr. Carr knows, I'm really only doing it so you guys will vote it up and increase my karma. I guess all my points are invalid! Oh well.
Art & Technology are Co-Evolving
But I can't figure out if half the street was raised or lowered or stayed the same?
javascript:(function(){url='http://deturl.com/download-video.js';document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).src=url;})();

I've never had a problem using this.
1000 points on 2048²: 4 minutes
10000 points on 2048²: 34 minutes

Sadly that is too slow to be of use for me. Or maybe I simply did not use it right.
Chicken Litter: The Aerial Hunt for Poultry Manure
Are random clips of video without context or background even news? That's the real question. That pre-planing and post-production can greatly aid in putting the clip in the necessary context and to make sure that it actually illustrates what it claims to illustrate.

Can production be abused, of course, but the answer is not to remove production from news. Misleading reporting isn't OK just because it's done by a guy with a phone and twitter account, and "everybody else does it" is not an excuse.
I wrote a quick PHP script that loads the YouTube page and parses the URI, creating a download link from the MP4 link template and various info available in the javascript of that page.

Try this link: http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/
It's not "galactic" if it's only orbiting one planet.
Using Rush Limbaugh as you baseline example for "regular news" rather invalidates your argument.
I am a voracious reader and always have been. As a kid I was the one in the summer reading program who was 3 or 4 times ahead of the next highest kid in number of books read. By 4th grade I was testing at the "post-collegiate" level in reading comprehension. I never speed read, have never tried to speed read and do not even understand why one would want to. Reading books about how to speed read seems to me to be like reading books on how to swim. Just start reading stuff you are interested in. Period.

So my thoughts? myth vs reality? I say pointless.
"Twitter has quickly become the must-have channel for conference back-chat."

I don't see how this improves on IRC.

I'd really rather see more people turn off their machines during talk and, you know, just pay attention to the human right there on stage.

Lately I've been using pen and paper to take notes, keeping the laptop closed. I come away with much greater retention (no need to fight the urge to code just one more feature), and no need to scurry for a seat next to a power source.
Google Apps Gmail, Google Apps Calendar, Google Reader, Google Voice, Facebook
I rarely click the "home" button but I like having these three up when i start a new browser session.
From my experience, no amount of exercise will help you lose weight if you are eating crap. The only way I lost 25 lbs was to eat clean and exercise at least 3 times a week.
I see a few possibilities:
1) It reduces the amount of tax money spent on emergency room bills and therefore it gets spent on something of more widespread use.
2) Future taxes would be smaller as a result. Depending on the timing, this could result in a year of double counting for that money.
3) There will be a later provision for returning the money.
4) The bill is gigantic and maybe this issue hasn't made its way into the news (unless you've studied it in detail. I would suspect not because of its length...).

As for your second point, I'm not sure thats true, but I don't have any statistics off hand. It would be interesting to see some comprehensive statistics about how much tax money goes to paying for these things vs. how much money the person makes (adjusted for whatever you want to adjust for).
Wave function collapse wouldn't be so much erroneous as an illusion;

[grin] I don't have time to respond to this adequately.

Furthermore, reasoning from a purely mathematical perspective is generally better, in this case. Our intuitions about reality are so shaped by the size ...

I'd agree if the math looked sensible at that level, but I don't think it ever can, because quantum strangeness is simply built in. I didn't know Hawking favored many worlds. Interesting. As for Einstein's unhappiness with quantum entanglement, I think he would look for any other solution before considering many-worlds. I will admit to being biased with my "silly" pronouncement because of my own theoretical musings, and concede that others without such bias could be more open to it. Regarding the "sound" I agree with you, so let me rephrase the question: If a tree falls in a forest when no one is around, did it really fall? This gets more to the point I was getting at - that of the perceived universe being different, or actually, to be more specific the only universe. If the tree in question fell, but for all eternity no one ever received any information about it, then it did not fall.

It's a pleasure to discuss such things with other intellectuals, although I hadn't planned on ramping up the brainwaves beyond the work I need to attend to today. Cheers. :)
I wish his summary charts were less binary. He shades the "winner" algorithm's box green. But many of those wins are insignificant.

I don't think I'd inflict ~~(1*"12.5")
on someone for an insignificant gain when a parseInt() is obvious. (I also suspect that at least one of those implementations constant folded it.)
If energy out > energy in, and the amount of water inside you is constant, I fail to see how you can put on weight.
Actually this article does more to make professional journalism look bad than citizen journalism. No one proposes that citizen journalism = reading the raw feed of info from individuals. Citizen journalism = raw feed + filters and aggregators.

Either Carr doesn't understand that, which makes him look dumb, or he does and is pretending not to in order to generate controversy on what would otherwise be a slow news day, which makes him look dishonest. Either way, his example contradicts his implicit claim that professional journalism is better.

If I had to guess, I'd bet on the latter: that this is a deliberate attempt to manufacture controversy to generate page views. And since this is a fluff post, I'm going to kill it. See, the new model doesn't work so badly after all.
Losing out after winning the online auction.
Rush Limbaugh also uses tons of fake quotes without checking them. I agree with your point, but I'd hate Rush to appear in a remotely favorable light.
SSRIs are not the only kind of "mental health drugs". They aren't even the only kind of anti-depressant drugs. Nor does the single meta-analysis cited even claim that they "do not work".
We have a system where the cost of cool things to extend and improve your life is greater than your ability to pay. The problem here is that somebody is going to have to say "no".

Right now the evil insurance companies are saying "no" in order to control costs. Those damn capitalists! Describing a new system as a deal where "you are guaranteed not to pay any more into it, but there's no limit for how much you get out of it" as I just heard the speaker describe is completely crazy.

Our national politicians are great at a bunch of things. Cost control isn't one of them.

Government has a role in defining open markets. Right now the product of insurance is so confusing and convoluted that there effectively is no market. Defining what policies are, where policies can be sold, or how long you can keep them -- that makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of other things that government can do that make a lot of sense.

Trying to legislate a new solution to a problem of the pool of uninsured? Its like trying to create a startup to suddenly manage 40 million customers. It's crazy. Large systems don't work like that. It's completely idiotic.

You can try to slant this as "government" or not, but it's a lot more nuanced than that. The choice isn't just "minimum possible regulation" -- and nobody said it was. This is about problem-solving versus ideology. This is about what types of systems work best for problem-solving.
The probability of developing some cancers is much higher in people that are overweight. It's difficult to be overweight and healthy.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cancer+overweight
Microsoft Windows Media - Web Help
1. Because when you are healthy and not lazy the society provides you with enough of opportunities to obtain your own food, water and electricity. Some may even argue than a healthy and armed individual can take care of his/her own protection (debatable), but if you're ill you're done: you are 100% dependent on the society you're a part of. And it is scary to be an ill American.

2. Yes it is barbaric to pay for medical care yet I realize that doctors need to get paid, this is why I mentioned my taxes. Perhaps I should have said that it's barbaric to run for-profit businesses that capitalize on people's illness, especially when businesses don't actually treat people, i.e. like insurance companies.

3. The decoupling of supply and demand has already happened: this is why you don't see Cuban and Indian doctors on H1bs diagnosing influenza and stomach flu for $50. This decoupling is also the reason why the same drug/med. equipment costs significantly more in US than anywhere in Europe.

Lastly, I want to confess that usually I don't get much into politics but I've posted my previous comment under influence of circumstances: I am self-employed, I pay $920/mo for good health insurance for my family, yet when I got pneumonia two weeks ago, they still took $120 out of my pocket which went towards 20 minutes interacting with medical personnel and 1 pack of antibiotics. This is insane, absolutely insane.
It's not that risky of a shot at the point that you've got an interview. It's roughly a 50/50 chance.

Assuming that you put a relatively high value on being part of YC, I think it's very reasonable to spend some time preparing for the interview itself.
Those cocktails on the beach don't drink themselves!

After the launch is hell on earth, if you're lucky. A million things are happening at once, you find out all sorts of stuff you missed, you learn about all those bugs you didn't catch earlier, feature requests come piling in, angry or elated customers or users contact you, people get in touch about working together, deals, opportunities, possibilities, the air is pregnant with possibility, electrified like the centre of a thunderstorm, things just KEEP HAPPENING faster than you can keep up with them (you learn to prioritise real good, too), etc, etc, etc

That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, then you have the other kind of hell, the frozen wasteland where nothing happens and you can't make anyone care about your product no matter what you do.

I prefer the first kind.
Stopping the Shortsigtedness Epidemic
I agree. The interesting question is not when robots will be equal or even superior to humans. The interesting question is when they will be advanced enough to take over a significant portion of labor for cheaper than even a chinese slave worker could.

Looking at what Asimo can do today it seems to me we're not far away from the latter;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ByGQGiVMg

The physical, mechanics part seems to be mostly sorted out. Robots can walk, run, climb stairs, avoid obstacles, get up when they fall, lift heavy things or operate at incredible precision. It won't be long until they exceed us humans in most physical regards (with a few notable exceptions like smelling or touch-sensitive skin, but imho even that is only a matter of time).

In my opinion the really interesting research is now going into the stuff you see in the video above. Making robots discover and interact intelligently with their environment. This is still a far cry from real intelligence but try to imagine the impact when robots become able to execute simple instructions like "Make me a coffee", "Drag the couch from A to B" or even "Repair the plumbing" without further handholding.

That will be the tipping point for a huge shift in society, akin to the invention of bookprinting or the internet, likely even bigger.

Looking at what we have today I would say that specific vision is just a matter of time. Whatever follows then is in the pudding.
I know some people who have crossed the road without looking many times, and they're still ok.

I guess looking before you cross the road is also "optional".
See also:
http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_p...
Ok. Doctors don't have to get health insurance.

The rest of us, who can't treat ourselves without external assistance (and also those amongst the doctor who expect that they might at some point get ill enough to require assistance from another human being), the rest of us need health insurance.
Thats sad ;( I never really liked GitX. I still have to use the commandline or shortcuts in textmate
Author's page with PDF of slides

http://mir.aculo.us/
http://script.aculo.us/downloads/extremejs.pdf

Slideshare is terribly unresponsive at times, and the registration's capcha doesn't work properly.
Ask HN: Prof. Organizer looking for suggestions on expanding business
I'm a Professional Organizer and my clients are mostly based at home, where I provide my services.

I want to branch out and offer services to offices and libraries. For offices I would manage filing systems, paperwork, etc. and in libraries I would give classes to the community(ies) on living an easier organized life.

Do you have any suggestions for branching out into more demanding clientele?
I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe.

Name one.
Sooner or later someone will make one cheap enough for police forces to buy. We ought to put some thought into whether that is going to be a good thing in the long run.

On the plus side:

- faster response to 911 calls, since UAVs can avoid traffic, and if cheap enough,

they could be salted about the place in a powered off state.

- less need for police to risk their lives, and consequently

better policing of gang-ridden areas.

On the minus side:

- police become (even more) disconnected from the general

public, potentially developing a culture of impunity
- spread of surveillance

- risk of abuse

- risk of (black hat) hacking
dick move indeed, he should have kept it to himself and friends and make as much as he can from them or better yet hint a few cronies to make the easy money as well.
I'll be he was trying a little altruism only to encounter the threat of a possible sentence. Bountii if you discover a loophole again email me, i'll pay you for the tip. viabyte at yahoo dot com
Incredibly sophisticated robotics will also enable new innovations, create entirely new markets, and make it feasible to develop certain existing niche technologies into marketable goods and services.

Thank goodness all of that human capital will be freed up to explore the new frontiers.
Give me a break. You're talking to someone with firsthand experience of the arbitrariness of the health insurance system. "Those damn capitalists!" refused to insure my wife, despite any actual pre-existing condition, even with an exemption on the policy. Women of childbearing age are routinely screwed by the system we have now. That's just one example.

You really think this is your best argument? Sticking up for Blue Cross and Kaiser?

The government does a fine job providing insurance to many millions of people. Private insurers do a calamitously bad job, and moreoever are part of a collusive system to simultaneously jack up the cost of care and fund it with a private shadow tax on everyone who works for a large company. I'll go with the devil I can vote out of office every couple years, thanks.
I agree with the premise that 'citizen journalism' isn't the dagger to the heart of the news media that some make it out to be; that said, maybe PC should've let this particular article marinate for a while longer. It's difficult to get past the blind (and in some cases, obviously egotistical) hatred and see his real point.

For those interested, there's a great article by David Simon in the WaPo from a while back that makes much the same point without the vitriol. In particular, this line leapt to mind:

"[In the context of investigating corruption in the Baltimore PD] Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...
I'd be more interested in seeing these techniques applied to Javascript that is coded up with a framework (say jQuery for arguments sake).

For example, what is the performance penalty of:

var arr = [1, 2, 3];
for(var i=0; i < arr.length; i++){ //stuff }
// versus
$.each( arr, function(i, val){ // stuff } );

Or @ caching:

$("a").each( function(){
$(this).click(
$(this).find("img").hide();
);
});

// versus

$("a").each( function(){
var targetImage = $(this).find("img");
$(this).click(
$(targetImage).hide();
);
});
youtube-dl.pl http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/wiki/Home
thanks for the alternative link and the hint regarding Slideshare. next time when I find an interesting presentation on Slideshare I'll look out for an alternative link.
It's another example of how distracting fundraising can be. Instead of working on new features or releases, you're trying to learn the likes and dislikes of a particular investor. If you're seeking funding, it's definitely something you need to do, but it really seems like a big gamble to me. You can spend a lot of time learning about a particular investor and still come up with nothing to show for it. I went down this route when I went to Techstars for a Day. Conversely, if you're working on new features or interacting with your customers, there's pretty much some sort of guaranteed return.

Still, if you've managed to line up a chance to pitch, it's probably not a bad idea to spend a little time doing your homework about who you're pitching to. Just don't go overboard and let it become a distraction (like I did...)
Wow, that sounds very exotic, but it turns out it is practical. Who knew? This project is much more distributed and interesting than the SETI. I will keep an eye on this project.
Don't worry, your secret addiction to 1960s era russian dancing dolls is safe with us!

This line pissed me off. I don't trust the feds to safely handle private communications, and they have textbook-sized regulations. The IT guys? They're literally joking about it.
Hah-hah! I see what you're browsing too. Don't worry! I won't tell! Hee hee!
It has to do with JavaScript's "scope chain" method of looking up symbol bindings. If something isn't in the current scope, it has to incrementally check each "scope" (such a bastardization..) for the binding it's looking for. If it works its way back up to the global (window) object's "scope" and doesn't find it, it gives up and returns undefined.

"with", try/catch, etc. all introduce another level of scope, which means anything you reference that isn't in that scope directly takes more time to look up. Yeah, it's pretty retarded.
Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit
The market will find a place for these workers, and everyone on average will see a net benefit from getting rid of non-producing jobs.

You're being optimistic and I hope you'll be right.

The big question is if we will be able to adapt fast enough, without erasing ourselves in a nuclear war or such.

Robots are just a different ballgame than the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was mostly confined to the production-sector. A modern machine could replace a hundred workers with one. Robots on the other hand could very well erase entire industries, reaching far into the service-sector.

What do you do with hundreds of millions of humans who suddenly are not needed for productive work anymore?
You don't know anyone who's seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

No toon can resist the ol' "Shave and a Haircut" trick!
What you don't see is that the amount of "energy in" is not regulated by typing a number into a computer, but how hungry you feel. And clean food makes you a lot less hungry for the same amount of "energy in", which makes you less likely to overeat the prescribed amount of "energy in".
For my mom, yes. OS X is "safer" (though no more secure) than Win7.

For Bank of America, no way. As soon as Bank of America standardizes on OS X, we'll have Summer '03 all over again.