skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with your sentiment on the ineptitude of our politicians, what actually happened was somewhat different. We as voters passed a bunch of propositions that increased spending while limiting the government's ability to tax. If our politicians are to be blamed, it is for not howling loudly that we have tied their hands.

Most of the blame falls on us citizens who went along with a system that doesn't work. Direct democracy is a cute thought, but in practice it spreads the responsibility too thin and fatally hampers a leader's ability to maneuver or veto obviously contradictory measures.

Perhaps now would be a good time to unwind this mess.
From what I have seen about the UK system it is very much based on a cost-benefit tradeoff for treatments. Basically they do all the treatments that fit in the budget ordered by how many extra years of life expectancy each will add on average to the patient. Other countries have much less rational ways of going about it so it may very well be that on the specific case of cancer they are bellow standard just because the standard is irrationally high.

Statistics about life expectancy at birth put them at number 25 slightly above the EU average and the US. They are still bellow a bunch of other European countries and of course life expectancy is a function of more than the health service itself but also the habits of the population in terms of diet, exercise, etc.

Edit: According to this (random google search):

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dea_fro_can-health-dea...

The UK actually beats the US and most of Europe on the number of actual cancer deaths. So either its healthcare or its eating/exercise habits is doing enough about cancer prevention to make them perform well on general survival. Maybe they do perform badly once you have cancer though.
On-the-fly code checking in VIM
> California is one of the most progressive states in the union. That progressiveness -- including some of the top public school districts in the country -- comes at a price: higher taxes.

The assumption that the cost is providing benefits may not be true.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-voegli1-2009nov01,...
Excel Services REST API
I want a program that allows the user to play a musical instrument by just thinking about it.

Start small and assign thoughts of moving ones arms to a particular note or chord.

This is completley possible but I haven't really heard of anyone developing it.
Most cable and satellite, digital at least, will cost around $50 a month and that's if you purchase internet as a bundle.
DVD Releases November 3 2009 | New DVD Releases
How will they calculate the Big Mac index for Iceland, now that McDonalds has left? http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/27/news/international/McDonalds...
The police in Norway doesn't carry guns, that should give you an indication...
You could assign particular chords to foot muscles and then play the flute to your own "mind-chord" accompaniment
recent research suggests that Britain and particularly
the United States have less social mobility than the
Nordic countries and Canada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
The controversy is just media and political hype. I recently wrote a blog post debunking it.

To sum it up: The M4 works fine when operated under the Army guidelines. It is a rifle, not a machine gun.

Trying to use a rifle like a machine gun is like trying to do Final Cut Pro editing on a iBook G3 laptop ... it ain't going to work well - but don't blame Apple.

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/10/13/the-truth-behi...
Tissue management software
Tissue management software from McKesson Surgical Solutions increases patient safety during transplant surgeries.
I also have a Vista at home ... using it as a media station and for experimenting with windows-only stuff.

I also used a Mac OS X for a whole year.

I still prefer Linux though. Yes, at first it seems like it is "death from a 1000 cuts". But when I'm switching OSes for my day to day work I find that I miss Linux more often than not.

I don't have a lot of money so I need free development tools that are decent for the kind of work I do. I also like the support given by some communities. And for that Linux is the best ... Ubuntu/Debian have the best and most properly maintained repository of open-source packages. Everything is one "apt-get install" away.

In Windows it's really killing me that I have to manually hunt and even compile my packages. And then make them work within my Cygwin environment, and then find ways for them to inter-operate with Windows-specific utilities. In Mac OS X I've used MacPorts but it's not a properly maintained repository ... the sources can take forever to compile, I've encountered situations were the dependencies where not resolved, and many software packages are just too old. And it's not a default and you end up with two Python interpreters, two Perls, two GCC compilers, etc...

Some say perfection is in the details. Mac OS X is certainly an improvement in some areas, but I remember using Tiger ... the default terminal app was not having multiple tabs. And when the wireless wasn't connecting to a router for some reason (when others laptops in the area did), I could find no way to debug the problem. I also did Java programming, and it was really killing me not having Java 6 on Mac OS X. And when it finally came out, it was incompatible with Tiger.

The parent is definitely not far off the mark.
If you had to shell out the price of windows or for that Macbook from work, you would feel the burden of paying for something that's only marginally better that a Linux distribution, an OS that you can actually own (as opposed to just owning the rights to use it), for free.

The only desktop software I would actually pay money for is Photoshop. Too bad that it doesn't work on Linux, but while working for Adobe the people there were actually quite open to Linux, so a Linux port is quite possible in the future.
>That assumption is rather dodgy on a couple of points.

I thought so too, that is why I pointed it out.

>One is that a lot of healthcare and education in the US is tax-supported.

It may very well be but less of it is compared to Scandinavia so the point is the same.

>Another is that a rational person may choose to spend money on things other than healthcare and education. Forcing them to spend it on healthcare and education can make them poorer, aka "less bang for same bucks".

Very true of course, but then you can't really argue that the Scandinavians are worse off because they can buy less retail goods because they put more money into their government to get healthcare and education. Choice need not be only about how to allocate private spending, you can also influence the tax/welfare situation.

>How about we compare average cancer survival rates?

I could only find cancer deaths not survival rates once you do have cancer. In a lot of ways that is what matters and can mean better preventive care. On the other hand it adds a bunch of environmental factors. Anyway, according to this:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dea_fro_can-health-dea...

The US is middle of the board. Sweden, Finland and Norway all beat the US. The only surprising one on that board for me was the Netherlands, with such high rates.
Opera Mobile 10 Beta For Nokia And Other Symbian/S60 Smartphones Released
If you're wondering "Thats funny, I'm on Slicehost and yet the Ride of the Valkyries is not playing on my cell phone, how odd": Both of their St. Louis data centers, where many of their older customers are, were unaffected.
I have to disagree. Weapons soldiers expect to rely on every day should be overengineered such that they continue to function when intentionally mistreated. The M-14 was. The M-16 and its variants are not.
If Norway is as Sweden/Finland, the food prices can be seen as a result of monopolists/oligopolies, Microsoft-style.

Since the population still mostly read local media, they aren't aware of reality. And it is possible for the food chains to avoid getting the population enlightened using large ad accounts in the media.

This has become a bit better in Sweden over the last decade, but e.g. Finland is still almost as expensive [edit: almost as expensive as Norway].

A fun data point is when the only non-ad supported tv in Sweden found a big scandal about remarking minced meat, almost certainly based on whistleblowers. Those whistleblowers have certainly talked to other media -- and to the controlling government agency for years... without effect.

(I've never heard the term "regulatory capture" in Swedish, it seems our political masters don't want us to know. 1/2 :-)

So yes, it is the media -- and lobbyists.
Cancer is what kills you if nothing else does. Either that or heart failure. If people are dying from TB or other easily treated (or prevented) diseases, then it's time to question the health system.

Early detection is a huge factor in treatable cancers, and that might be social factors (Brits refusing to go for a checkup), rather than their health-care system.

The biggest difference is between men and women; not between countries. Perhaps women are more likely to get their lumps checked?
Ask HN: Badly Timed Inspirations?
It's November 2, Thoughtscream Media's application was tossed in a week ago, and all of a sudden, my technical cofounder and I are awash with a ton of fascinating back-end and design possibilities that didn't occur to us before the deadline.

Part of it is my fault - the content format experimentation I'm currently conducting was the inspiration for a lot of our current discussion, and I really should've done it /while/ working on the application - but it does seem as if having sudden brainstorms after everything's been squared away is a common problem for us.

Who else amongst this season's applicants are being plagued by post-deadline brainstorms? And how do the rest of you deal with it?

(us, we're filing this away on a /front/ burner. The moderated wiki implementation for followup news stories could be /tremendously/ helpful...)
Bruce Bawer reminds me of a religious zealot, having been confronted with facts forcing him to accept that the world is more nuanced than what the American post-war era he grew up in propounded. The reaction is predictable, but ensues nonetheless.
These comparisons are obviously bogus. If Norway is worse than the US, why do they have a good public healthcare system and a much lower poverty rate? And don't get me started on that slur about 'drug users crowding the streets'. Please, check your facts.

About 'frugal living' and 'underpaid teachers': perhaps we feel rich, precisely because we are satisfied with our ten year old toaster and our home-made lunch. Partly because we don't feel the need to consume-consume-consume, as the US has brainwashed its citizens to do. Partly because of simple cultural differences: Norwegians like to bring their own lunch; Spaniards like to go to a neighbouring lunchroom. The relative cost of said lunchroom has nothing to do with it.

Also nice to see this together with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918590 . Anyone wonder why no European state has these kinds of problems?
Just off the top of my head, 25 days off a year (not including public holidays) is the norm in Britain, compared to, what, 5-10 in the US? The attitude towards work is very different in Europe, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if working hours were lower.
M-16 bashing has been a popular sport since the rifle was introduced. Many (me included) feel the heavier, more rugged and far moe powerful M-14 was a better weapon. That said, the worst problems of the early M-16 were corrected long ago, and the current version isn't especially unreliable compared to other modern military rifles.
I've read 18 books this year, 14 of those were fictional.

I'm pretty sure that I gained/ learned more from the fictional books. But I guess that's a matter of perception.

P.S.
Also a bit annoyed and shocked that people "don't read fiction."
Be careful with this. After using this plugin for most of the day, I found it broke Firebug's mouse selection tool. Disabling the plugin fixed it.

Cool idea.. but Firebug's code is not stable to begin with and adding hacks like this will only increase the frustration.
I'm checking this out too, looks pretty great so far. Thanks for the heads up!
Two things I noticed while watching someone use this:

When reaching the end of the story, the person wanted to turn back one page, but this is impossible - you can only go back to the start.

The hover popup never activated - the person would click on the story, and never see the popup. I would have a click bring up the popup, and make a button from the popup that goes to the record page.
For those of who are don't know guns, the AK-47 vs. AR-15 debate is at least as heated, if not more so, as vim vs. emacs ;)
Customized App Recommendations To Your iPhone
The Social Requirements of Technical Systems
So all those blonde homeless guys I see lining up for free meals at the Mission downtown, I guess those guys would all be of German-American descent, huh?
There is a Rackspace update; from reading it this hit one of the fluke single points of failure in one of their power system.

Considering how data centres are set up there isn't much they could have done to stop it :)

Looks like human error (during the servicing)
Sub::Call::Recur (Clojure's recur implemented in Perl)
We don't feel the need to consume-consume-consume, and we certainly aren't brainwashed. This is really uncalled for - we do like a certain standard of living, but it doesn't mean we're brainwashed consumption machines born to satisfy an economic purpose as laid out by the federal reserve.

Yes, most of my friends have playstations, flat screen TVs, and leased cars. Some of this stuff is financed by debt. But they do lead a pretty good life and they're not crippled by debt or three backbreaking jobs.

We love to play, and we work hard to do it. It's a different mindset - there is no reason to be insulting.
Poolcasting: automating music playlists for a listening audience
Zak, you did not read, or maybe understand, my comment. A rifle != machine gun. Physics sucks but there is nothing that can be done about it.

You cannot fire a gun constantly. The barrel will eventually heat up to near melting point, then explode when a round is fired.

Machine guns have heavy profile barrels (ie. really thick) and can be replaced quickly. Machine gun teams carry spare barrels for this purpose.
Sorry @pushingbits, but this is just trolling.

I have two wlan USB sticks that work out of the box on Ubuntu and Debian (I wasn't even careful about that when buying them). In fact, those two sticks I own don't work at all on Vista (they were designed for XP), and don't work on XP without installing the drivers first.

Ever tried installing Mac OS X on a non-Apple computer? Ever tried using hardware that doesn't specifically mentions "compatible with Mac OS X" on the box?

Try it sometimes.

The solution to your problems is to find Linux-compatible hardware. People do that for Apple computers, I don't get it why it is such a big deal for Linux, but IMHO since Linux does work out-of-the-box with most hardware devices, you'd expect it to work with everything. Well, sometimes it doesn't.

Linux has many other problems but hardware drivers are not it.
Then I guess this story from ABC Chicago is a big lie, and the food bank is really just gonna buy $5 Dominos pizzas for everyone?

"CHICAGO (WLS) -- A food pantry on Chicago's far South Side says it has run out of food to help the needy.

The Greater Chicago Food Depository says food banks throughout the city are in desperate need of donations.

The economic downturn is making it harder for many to feed their families.

The food depository says there has been a big jump in demand for help at area food banks. That's expected to go up as the holiday season approaches. And they need more supplies to meet the demand."..."

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=6...
Damnit, geeks always want data, here's what I could find on Google,
1,360 vs 1,804 work hours in 2005 according to http://www.swivel.com/data_columns/show/2465290

Half the violent crimes according to http://dev.prenhall.com/divisions/hss/worldreference/NO/crim... and http://dev.prenhall.com/divisions/hss/worldreference/US/crim...

I can't explicitly find the comparison of the 10% poorest but it can be deduced from the statistics you can find on google if you're interested.
I hope you're talking about the US.
SEO Optimization
Link building is a very important feature of SEO. Without it, your website can be lost in cyberworld. To understand the process of building links it is also necessary to comprehend some major terms.
LOL, nice.
" Yet respondents states that Canadians dislike America on a whole more since Obama took office than before, and that Canadians feel less safe visiting the US than before."

Funny you mention that. I just took a train tonight from Vancouver Canada, to Seattle WA. The difference between the two places for night and day, and what you just said sums it up perfectly.

When I got on the train on the Canadian side, the streets are bustling with activity, they're also clean. Homelessness is a problem, but overall the city is kept in good shape and business is booming. The train station is old, but kept in good repair, with many travellers milling about.

I get off the train in Seattle and I see a crumbling train station that can't even afford to replace its light bulbs. The moment I walk out the door I am accosted by a group of homeless folk. I am yet accosted by more homeless folk as I make my way to the bus stop. As I ride the bus downtown the streets are deserted, there's homeless folk everywhere, people picking fights in streets... it's like a bad 80s dystopian movie come to life. It reminds me of Demolition Man without the open firefights in the streets. I've lived here for several months now and I do not feel safe walking these streets at night. Hell, sometimes I don't feel safe walking these streets in broad daylight. There's garbage everywhere, poverty at levels I could not even imagine before moving from Canada. There are shootings in my neighbourhood weekly. People I've mentioned this to blame me for living downtown, and imply that this comes with living in an urban centre. I call bullshit: I've lived downtown in 3 different Canadian cities, and none were anywhere this bad. One is also much larger and denser than this one.

I've only been to a handful of other American cities - but if Seattle is the best you've got (and by national rankings it's pretty far up the list of good cities), you guys have a big, big, big problem.
The statistics are misleading, but the problems they point out are inherent in the political system of Norway. The distribution of wealth using taxes (income, land and VAT) for all political parties is more or less the same. T
here are few really rich people and few poor people. The real difference to the US as I see it is the purchase power of the middle class and upper middle class. In Norway, oil and the middle class is paying the bill for the expansive and expensive state. 5 years of uni education only gets you a 25%-40% extra pay when you start out (compared to uneducated work), but makes it possible to double it over time.
You can meet all your IPv4 exhaustion counter needs here: http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/
he sums it up quite well at the end.

if you write a lot of code under a set of assumptions which then changes, you're in trouble.

I think the key question is: do my assumptions differ from my customers assumptions, if so where?
Depends. When I interview a candidate I can say if he is a good programmer or not after talking with him for 30 minutes.
May be because I am a programmer.

And I think I am bad interviewer if I cannot do that.

Do we really TEST Lawyers, Surgeons, Cooks in an interview?
Let me ask again.

Are you guys saying this video ABC report from Chicago about A food bank Chicago emptied of food is a lie?

Do know that unemployment runs 70% among people with partial disabilities trying to find work? What do you think these perpetually unemployed partially disabled people are doing, living off their trust funds?
The permanently disenfranchised immigrant underclass that the American economy relies on doesn't exist in Norway.
Actually, no, it wasn't. The author made a statement and asked people to discuss it. He never claimed it to be correct.
Its worth of reading so just do it! now!
That was not a very convincing mea culpa on the part of the RockYou folks...looked more like an ad than an admission of past wrongdoing or sincere desire to do right.
The author of that so-called "cancer survival rates" BS is Betsy McCaughey, the woman who invented the "death panels" nonsense.

Here's link to webpage with video of John Stewart unloading on Betsy McCaughey for 2 entire segments of the Daily Show because of the "death panels"

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/finally-jon-stewart-gives-betsy-m...
I strongly disagree, OpenOffice and firefox are just trying to drag their weight, and they still try to integrate shiny stuff even when they're still far from the par. Moreover, a bunch of dev saying "no" to a marketing team and choosing technical stuff first is not the same as a product manager saying "no" to everybody, being developer or marketer or customer or presales.
I used to be in this position of saying "no" (even to my boss), and you have no friends there.
We need to raise property taxes and only exempt the seniors!
>> "We'll be down to our last tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of web addresses by the end of next year,"

I don't buy it. There's millions of unused IP addresses, mostly massive blocks that were allocated to big companies early on. If IPv4 addresses truly become scarce, these big companies will simply start selling some off.

Not saying it's a bad idea to switch over, but it's not something most people need worry about for a few years IMHO.

We've been hearing this for years now. It's like when I was at school they told us we'd run out of oil in 2000 or something.
Here's the link with the original "cancer rates" article

"U.S. Cancer Care Is Number One
No. 596

Thursday, October 11, 2007

by Betsy McCaughey

During this presidential election season, candidates are urging Americans to radically overhaul our “broken” health care system. Before accepting the premise that the system is broken, consider the impressive evidence from the largest ever international study of cancer survival rates..."

More lies from proven liar Betsy McCaughey

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596
> This is really uncalled for - we do like a certain standard of living, but it doesn't mean we're brainwashed consumption machines […]
>
> Yes, most of my friends have playstations, flat screen TVs, and leased cars.

See? That's how brainwashing works: you don't realize it. That's the point.
I'm having the same problem with the trackpad on my MBP in Windows 7. It's a serious drag.

The drivers work, for the most part, but obviously not as well as in OSX. Have resorted to a USB mouse (another PITA, but I'm getting stuff done).
> Just off the top of my head, 25 days off a year (not including public holidays) is the norm in Britain

I think the EU mandates 4 or 5 weeks (not sure which), in the US as far as I know there is no federal mandates. Also, paid sick days.