skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently I've got this wrong. Baumol's Cost Disease is a theory in dispute. I just googled "Baumol's Cost Disease Arts" and found:

The first link is to the wp article. The second is an Amazon listing for a book called Baumol's Cost Disease: the Arts And Other Victims. (http://www.amazon.com/Baumols-Cost-Disease-Other-Victims/dp/...). The author is apparently an economics professor at a University in England. There's also an abstract from the Journal of Cultural Economics. Baumol apparently developed his claim in the 1960s by looking at the economics of the performing arts, and then generalized it to education and health care.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/k16p700536510057/

At the top of the second page is a New Yorker article that certainly would have made a better HN submission:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/07/07/030707ta_talk_su...

But apparently, the jury is still out. Google also turns up links to skeptical papers:

"Has Baumol's Cost Disease disappeared in the performing arts?"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

and

"Why I do not Believe in the Cost Disease"

http://www.springerlink.com/content/xuegr8k39y17t3nq/
"So our product needs managers and our product is built by developers who need managers and process to organize how the build is managed? All this to support a level of accountability and transparency not respected by the business? Sold."
Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech at Stanford, 2005
It's not purely a tax decision. Staff gets fired when they screw up. Contractors just don't get re-upped. Staff have a 1:1 relationship with the company. Contractors have a 1:N relationship. When they don't get re-upped, they take more hours elsewhere.
So flag it then.
Google is not a monopoly. You can go elsewhere for your ads, email, and search. If Google starts sucking even a little bit, other people will do the same, and Google's market influence will decrease even further.
What do you not think about (just playing devil's advocate here)?
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. The thing is there's nothing unique about string quartets or orchestras. Prior to the availability of recorded music, you couldn't listen to music without musicians, and for something complex like a symphony or an opera that meant you had to go buy a seat.

But nowadays there are lots of orchestras, whereas the number of consumers who can tell the difference between a good performance and an outstanding performance is pretty low. This has been good for orchestras in places like Eastern Europe, who in recent years have made money by playing music for sample libraries, movies and videogames for much less money than it would cost to book a similarly skilled orchestra in the USA.

On the other hand, as the number of recordings increase, consumers have less and less need for new ones. In terms of pure sound quality recording techniques have largely ceased to improve - the fidelity modern recording gear far exceeds the resolving power of the human ear, so if you go out and buy a great surround recording of a Beethoven symphony, that's pretty much as good as it gets, technically. You won't get a better recording in 5 years; you can only hope for a better performance.

But very few consumers care so much that that they want to accumulate multiple different recordings of the same music, deriving pleasure for the individual interpretations of different conductors and orchestras. Most of them will either buy 'all the classic hits you'll ever need' (performed by some hack orchestra, but hey, it's 99 tunes in a box), or else go for what most people agree is the best (Pavarotti singing Pagliacci or whatever).

And the supply of new orchestral tunes, and the audience for them, is very small...film soundtracks are probably the main source of orchestral raw material, and the payments for that are generally a fixed fee.

One issue I do have with the Baumol thesis is that saying that wages of musicians have risen is sort of meaningless, because so have prices for other things. It's unclear to me whether the purchasing power of musicians has risen relative to the cost of goods and services, or whether it has merely kept pace with inflation...but I blame the summary nature of Wikipedia for that.
The triple talaq is a mechanism for divorce which exists in some forms of Islam. It simply consists of the husband saying the phrase I divorce you (Arabic:talaq) to the wife, three times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_talaq

I definitely like the idea.
We're splitting hairs now and down to the meaning of "lotteries are stupid" :)

I see your distinction though, I was meaning the latter when I said "lotteries are stupid".
He thinks that it's only 5 years away... 2015 est. completion date.
I think patriotism is just a special case of misusing the word "we". As in "we put a man on the moon". No you didn't. Hundreds of physicists, mathematicians, engineers, workmen, and men (and women) with really big balls put a man on the moon. You had almost nothing to do with it (other than being forced to provide an infinitesimal part of the funding, but that's hardly your achievement).
Darpa's latest challenge: Locate these 10 balloons
Finally! A chance to drag my mom, who doesn't have a computer, into the internet age!

Since it doesn't look like it handles HTML or images, here's what I sent her:

Happy Holidays, Mom!

\/\/\/\/
/ \
/ \
/ \
/\_/ 0 0 \_/\
| |
\/ \ |_| / \/
\ /
\ \-----/ /
\ /
\_______/
| |

Love, Eddie
Doesn't appear to work with Firefox 3.5.5
The starwars.yahoo.com website will be closing
I agree 100%. Having the government decide what is a good idea or not for a startup is ridiculous.
Usually laws restrict what individuals can do, limiting thier individual freedom, to provide what will (hopefully) be a better situation for the greater good.
By your definition of patriotism, there is no such thing in practice. It always degrades from loving your country because you were born in it, to hating other countries because you weren't born in them. It's extremely rare to see a benevolent version of patriotism the way you describe it.
I don't need people to be i.i.d. Statistical independence along with some minor technical conditions are sufficient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_condition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindeberg%27s_condition

Lumping in seniors with 22 year olds does not reduce the variance any more than lumping in 22 year olds with more 22 year olds does.

Statistical variance is not a major contributor to the cost of health insurance. You are simply wrong on this point.

Additionally, adverse selection has nothing to do with a variable risk pool. Adverse selection is a problem caused by asymmetrical information: if you know you are sick, you might lie to your insurance company about preexisting conditions to gain insurance. Adverse selection also has nothing to do with a variable risk pool.
True, I should have shortened it to just lisp. Here we go:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+lis...

Yep, still noise.
There is nothing new about Google.
loved the quote at the end. "stay hungry, stay foolish"
Patriotism is the belief that people who happened to be born on this bit of land created something unique and greater than the sum of its parts here, and the desire to be a part of that and live up to its ideals.

If someone doesn't feel that where they are now, and doesn't relocate to somewhere where they can feel it, well, I feel a bit sorry for them.
For those who aren't interested in installing silverlight, it's just a street view clone, but much slower, with a fraction of the coverage, more obvious shearing when you move around and a blue circle with a person icon instead of a simple white circle for navigation.
The cards acknowledge Judaism, but not Christianity.

This isn't unheard of, but I expected more from Google.
"Design Patterns aren't" is required reading for anyone interested in both Alexander's work and software design patterns: http://perl.plover.com/yak/design/

Same goes for Alexander's speech at The 1996 ACM Conference: http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm
This is the reasoning Al Gore uses when he claims to have invented the Internet.
For extra credit square Baumol's Cost Disease with the Cambridge capital controversy.
I believe in a democracy+capitalism gov't has to be as large as necessary and no larger. We cannot always say that gov't has to be small, it has certain duties one of which is to make sure, through legal means, that the system does not destroy itself. Once we agree that net neutrality is required for healthy capitalism, what possible ways are there to guarantee it other than a meaningful amount of regulation. It is in the same vein as regulation needed to prevent monopolies.
If you limit the power of the government, wouldn't this then simply shift the balance of power to private individuals and corporations?

Then instead of abusive governments, we'd have abusive companies.

I mean the government takes certain powers away from private citizens in order to prevent us from abusing these powers (murder, fraud, etc).

I agree that there are probably regulations that impede competition from performing ideally, but sometimes it is necessary, like in the public utilities. Some of these things simply can't work as well if we have multiple companies trying to screw each other over.

Certainly the argument is valid, at least theoretically, that if we do not codify net neutrality, and deregulate the internet business, the companies that favor the consumers the most (most likely the net neutral ones) will dominate in the end, but there are other issues that come in practice. Who gets to create infrastructure (cables and stuff) through the ground when there are hundreds of them? Imagine if we privatized electricity. We'd have multiple powerlines everywhere. It'd just increase overall waste. Or perhaps radio wave broadcasting were to be deregulated. Nothing would function. There are potential problems if we don't regulate the ISPs and let them all duke it out. Sometimes the sum of the whole does not equal the parts.
As sort of an aside: I'm living in England, and have a friend with a very (English) nationalistic bent - and he actually identifies far more with, say, our Indian or Polish communities than he does with the angry, ignorant, BNP style person that would have them "go home", as he sees them as having a far greater sense of their heritage than the baseball-cap wearing, drum-and-bass club-frequenting, take-away chomping thralls that have "lost all sense of their national identity".

How important any of this is is definitely open to debate (we argue about it all the time, actually), but he's a smart guy with an interesting point of view, and I think he serves as a good example of why you shouldn't automatically associate patriotism/nationalism with racism, protectionism and bigotry.

That said, though, he is probably quite an exception in this regard.
It's extremely rare to see a benevolent version of patriotism the way you describe it.

I see it every weekend at Rugby matches.
School district fires tech supervisor for running SETI@home on their hardware
Perhaps instead of jumping on the de-Google bandwagon, they should jump on the website-design-that-works-in-all-browsers bandwagon so they don't steer readers away due to their blatant incompetence.

http://imgur.com/L7v8L
Will a dime buy you a gallon of gas today, as it would in the early 1900s? It would if it were a silver dime, which is roughly worth $3 now. People don't notice loss of value as easily as when it's obviously measurable, as in loss of metal. The law (hypothetically) would decree coins had that amount of metal, and discrepancies would make the news. I'm not arguing for metal, so much as pointing out its contrast with non-backed currency.
To be fair, this was not at all part of the original proposal; it's one of those idiotic riders tacked on by politicians after they get their hands on something. The only "approval" required was in the form of investors stumping up cash. Any accreditation should be of the investors, not the the founders.
They "would have supported cancer research" to the tune of $1M? Smells trumped-up to me.
Yes but the law doesn't specifically say major studio films right? I'm just saying the law itself is not exactly contradictory.
Figured as much after I played around with making this work. Thanks!
like fart apps?
"So when I buy a shirt, whether the job of making it went to an American or a Chinese person, someone got paid and I’m happy for that."

While I (think I) understand the heart of this sentiment, if you're going to be non-patriotic, you should still be pro-human rights to some degree.

If a corporation exploits workers (either at home or abroad), you shouldn't be happy about giving them your money. Yes, the "anti-establishment, local-everything" crowd takes this to the extreme, but I still think it should be a factor in your decision-making.
> Yes, and if you self-distribute, you become the distributor.

I interpreted your post as saying that everyone can become a self-distributor on the internet. So I was commenting that if you use iTunes/Amazon/YouTube/etc you are not a self-distributor, you've just moved to a different distributor that may provide better service/terms/etc. So we are essentially on the same page.
This illustrates why government should not be trusted with the control of money. What N. Korea is doing is massive theft, but so is the issuing of any fiat currency. The Federal Reserve is just a better thief than N. Korea because it steals at a slower, smoother rate, thus not totally killing the incentive to produce.
Now there's an infinitely-answerable question! I don't think bout what would happen if my pineal gland turned into trifle, or the implications of the increasing variety of hair-care products on Afro-Vietnamese relations, or how many M&Ms it would take to fill my shoe (though I admit that the latter question could well turn up in one of these trendy job-interviews we keep hearing about - get researching!)

Basically, I don't think about those things (in any depth, at least) because nobody else does. Subjects such as the double-edged sword of nationalism etc. plague our collective consciousness and as such are worth the brain-cycles, if you're that way inclined.
"high taxes on the land you're using"

Lines (power, telegraph, gas, etc) are generally run on easements purchased from the underlying landowner. Right-of-ways and property for railroads were often government-granted, so it was easier to negotiate with the railroad for an easement for a telegraph line than with a few thousand individual landowners, any one of which could easily raise your costs by refusing to allow you to go through their land.

"government not allowing you to bury lines below roads and other obstructions"

In the 1800's this was not really a big problem. Besides, telegraph lines generally ran on poles.
A different story suggests that he was found with 18 school computers at his house, that he failed to install any firewall software, and that he failed to supervise the rest of the technical team.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130se...

It sounds like SETI@home was a pretty small part of the reason he got fired.
Google May Build Green-Tech Power Plants
I think I would label this as more of a weakness in how the user who cares about encrypting the document is going about it.

Can't you just save the original file to an encrypted volume (such as with TrueCrypt), and shouldn't you make sure that you're not saving any sensitive data in plaintext to any unencrypted volumes?
I think Google's banking on people using this tool to send postcards to their non-email friends & family. I think it creates good brand recognition for those that may not have an email address or use email rarely.
Ask HN: Equity for a first employee
What's a reasonable range of equity (options) for a first employee (engineer; two nontechnical founders) with a 500k convertible-debt seed round?
Something that wastes millions of hours per day and prevents anyone from replacing it with something better by virtue of its monopoly position and hostility to mash-ups? Yes, I can find the time to hate on it.
Give homework where the most interesting part is not something that Wolfram Alpha can solve.
You can print these too -- even in high res:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/holidaycard/print.html
Doesn't work in Chrome on OSX (can't type in search box, either).
PPC Loophole
PPC Loophole is actually a complete, solid system to dominate any marketing, make millions per year with minimal advertising cost.
It will be interesting to see from where these cards are postmarked. That will provide a good clue about Google's seeming benevolence.

When I worked on medical records software, I looked into some companies that offered an API for sending snail mail. Doctor's offices spend a lot of time sending out form letters, and it seemed like it would be cool to automate sending out lab results letters. Obviously, email would be preferred (given patient consent), but physicians have to deal with the lowest common denominator (while blissfully ignoring illiteracy). Perhaps Google is experimenting with such a service? However, given all the things Google could provide to Apps users, this seems pretty low on the list.

I'd put money on this being an experiment or beta test in disguise as holiday cheer. Think GOOG411 -- a great way to collect voice samples.
This is the problem area that bugs me about the founder visa concept. The concept is great. Embodying it into law requires it go through the sausage factory.

I jokingly told a doctor last week I could write health care reform in 5 pages. I'm pretty sure I could. But it wouldn't get through congress in that form.
Since we're focused on Google, logically the best strategic decision is to accept that you can't change the terrain on the battlefield, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Four Steps to the (Gov 2.0) Epiphany
From a consumer's point of view, yes, that's true. It's easy to switch to a different email provider or a different search engine.

From an advertiser's point of view, that is just not the case. Advertisers are forced to use Google, because that's what an overwhelming majority of consumers use. The alternative is to be crushed by your competition.

It's interesting to me that so many of Google's paying customers complain about them, and so many of their non-paying customers love them. Isn't that backwards?
In the case of net neutrality, it's an exchange of freedoms - giving the individual greater freedom at the cost of freedom for companies.
I typically don't comment on threads on MSFT since I work there but I'll make an exception (disclaimer - my own opinion, etc, etc).

I was there in person for this talk and quite disappointed. At first I thought it was because the talk was so critical of MSFT but on thinking further, I decided it was really because the talk was shallow and I expected something better from someone with such credentials (the fact that the talks leading up to this were great probably played a part too). I really expected a 'deeper' talk with some insights. I think the talk slots the two companies into a false dichotomy and regurgitates the 'good vs evil' metaphor, which frankly, is a bit old and not very accurate.

I spent the last 2 minutes of the talk wondering whether I could do a Wilson-style "You lie" at Ignite :)
I've seen this multiple times but now I'm going to have to watch it again.

Thanks for posting.
Voice Recognition on Windows 7 is dirty
18 computers and other equipment stolen from the district

This seems slightly ambiguous to me. Were there 18 computers, plus some other equipment? Or were there 18 items, among which which was at least one computer? In either case, it's more than there should be, but it does make a difference in terms of severity.

I wonder if this had more to do with it:

Decisions are made in isolation with no input or communication with stakeholders
Purchasing decisions are made with no consultation or input from others

It sounds like he's managed to step on a good number of toes, and the rest was brought up to justify the firing.
Analytics & Ethics: Is Big Brother Watching?
It shouldn't be. Plenty of up-and-up companies subcontract, but they tell you that sooner than the day the project kicks off.
They acknowledge a (very) secular symbol of Christmas (Rudolph) as well as a secular symbol of Hanukkah. It's just that an expectation to be inclusive with these types of things means an explicit acknowledgement of Judaism. And the design they have is pretty cool.

The Dreidel is a secular symbol that happens to be much older than Rudolph; a menorah would have been inappropriate in the same way as an image of Jesus in the manger.
The page looks completely empty to me without JavaScript, except for some small parts of the navigation. That might be an additional point.
I remember university teacher of mine had a collection of a few problems which if you typed it into Mathematica would give an answer on a very different form than what you would be likely to get if you solved by hand the 'normal' way. Handy for giving you a heads up on who might be 'cheating'.
Is this out of fear of or caving in to pressure from Rupert Murdoch?
Or follow the rules of the agreement in good faith, which appears to be challenge for some folks.
Gawker Media Has 400 Million Monthly Pageviews
Biased nonsense???

* Google makes money from ads. The more people that are online (and using its "properties"), the more money it makes. They appear to be "monetizing" web-based traffic extremely well.

* Microsoft has a long history of sucking the life out of its "partners" (Quarterdeck/DESQview, Stacker, Spyglass, WordPerfect, and OS/2 off the top of my head). See also http://grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history.

Obvious, maybe. Nonsense, no.
You sure are better with math than I am. But you're not helping me understand how, given the fact that the majority of the uninsured in the US are below the age of 35, and the fact that people under the age of 35 have less reason to pay into the system than people over 35, and the fact that people under the age of 35 are similarly much less likely to incur costs, mandated guaranteed issue or government single-payer doesn't improve the risk pool.

You've clearly demonstrated that the problem with the current insurance scheme isn't a trivial stats 101 observation, but I feel like you're dodging the point because I've given you an excuse to do so by making that point clumsily.
Interesting question.

Assuming this engineer is fairly valuable to your startup due to the non-technical co-founders, you might have to give up more than normal (0.5-1.5% equity). I don't have a number in mind, but I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this.

Guys, thoughts?
It's been done (better) 60years ago - look up 'Deltic'
How large is the cost of a secretary filling out a form compared to an MRI? You are talking about adding a few dollars to the cost of an a procedure priced at $400 or more (I don't need preapproval below $400).

A doctor only needs to get involved in the case that a preapproval is not granted, i.e. when the procedure appears unnecessary.
It's not the housing that costs. It's the land underneath the housing that is valuable. The reasons are demand and supply. The supply is fixed, the demand can vary greatly for a number of reasons. However, the only way to lower the price to live on that land is to make it in less demand, which means making the area less attractive to live in. Hardly what anyone wants.
Mint's CEO gave a talk that covers this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGhedOHLTOI

His first engineer got ~$50K + 2% IIRC.
That's actually pretty much in the ballpark (0.5-1.5%)