skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple not only has great technical execution, they have great design execution. There are many industries with lots of excellent companies capable of this combination (automobiles, musical instruments, film, firearms, fashion) but in software this combination is rare as hen's teeth. Thus Apple's dominance in certain markets and customer devotion.
They get that on a successful product anyway regardless of whether they funded the research (the idea of commercial taxes being that they pay for industrial and fiscal infrastructure including IP enforcement). In other words there's no incentive for the taxpayer to subsidize research on that basis, whereas shorter patent terms or something would bring benefits back to the public sooner than otherwise.
So you claim that high labour productivity is fully reflected in money spent on employees, and just not reflected in wages?

He claims that competition from low wage economies means that higher labour productivity from technology and capital won't be reflected in wages. He claims that only the competitive merits for of US labour will be reflected.

I think some Democrats are looking at US health care costs and trying to address them, in spite of attempts mostly by Republicans to derail that process.
It is a real effect.
UK companies analyse which regional British accents are most trusted/most calming/etc before deciding where to put their customer call centres.
Facebook Talking to Developers About New Plans for Its Virtual Currency
A language is just a dialect with an army

Luxembourgish is identical to the local German accent - but one is an official language while just over the border it's a dialect
A little love from al3x: http://twitter.com/al3x/status/6093589335
"Fun fact: I was thinking about building a dating site before I joined Twitter. Neat to see projects like http://plentyoftweeps.com/
http://kanjifuda.com/ is a "native" app that is actually a small Objective-C wrapper around jQTouch.
I imagine that distinction is too subtle to matter. It might make some lawyers more cash though.
Economic "laws" are a mixture of gross simplifications and statistical kludges, all of which describe patterns of behavior within some domain of limited parameters, at some scale of detail and timespan.

Of course, the same can be said for pretty much any scientific principle!

To expect a law of economics to hold in any arbitrary market is like expecting Kepler's laws of planetary motion to hold for any possible configuration of bodies.

Whether a given law holds in the health care market, and why that may or may not be the case, is another matter, and a very complicated question to boot. The only thing that can be safely assumed is that anyone offering a pat, simple answer ("we need the government to do X so that the market will Y!") is oversimplifying.
I'm not the op, but I believe he would be arguing that the basic microeconomic principle of Health Care being a public good dictates that this provision is a market failure. As such, like transportation and armies and education, the service is best provided - on a micro level - in something other than a free market model.

Certainly, data comparing US expenditures on health care to other countries supports this.
Probably true, but irrelevant to the article, which is about how more effectively to teach Standard English by recognizing that some students start from a different dialect.
A concise testing strategy
I wasn't aware that the iron law of economic scarcity doesn't apply to medicine or that marginal utility is nullified.

Statistical kludges? Wow, that's already way over my head.
I think its interesting retro style is noteworthy in its execution. Then again, my 'crew' and I started writing articles in the e-Zine era before finally migrating to a blog format. I may be showing my age.
It's common to confuse the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle, but they are not the same. In fact, they are nearly opposite to one another, despite producing similar outcomes. The DP proposes that those who have shown themselves incompetent are promoted, either to get them out of the way or because the competent people are needed to do "actual work". The PP proposes that those who display competence in their current work will be promoted until they reach the point where they are no longer competent. Notice that the PP assumes that higher-level jobs are harder or require rarer skills, while the DP assumes the opposite.
Why GOO is especially object-oriented
First of all, F=MA is a law. Economics is a guess.

Second of all, parent is not claiming that economists' predictions about the free market system do not apply to health care. He's saying that the field of microeconomics specifically predicts that in some scenarios, the free market system just doesn't work very well; that is, the market does not facilitate a scenario in which market participants efficiently distribute goods/services, and therefore do not benefit optimally from them. This is called market failure. Healthcare fits several of the criteria for a failing, nonefficient market. Namely:

- Monopolistic competition.

- Healthcare is a non-optional service.

- Informational asymmetry - that is, doctors generally have more information about medicine, as well as about the specific medical state of their patient, than the patient does.

For more information, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microeconomics#Market_failure

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

[PDF] http://www.stevereads.com/papers_to_read/uncertainty_and_the...
FreeBSD 4.2 was my first copy. I had so much fun tinkering with it. It's still my favorite unix os.
My mom has a master's degree in Child Development, has been teaching for the past 15 years, and currently teaches a kindergarten class in Southern California consisting of inner-city kids of black, white, hispanic, Indian, and Asian descent. I know a fair amount about this topic, and her views are in line with mine.

EDIT: I wanted to be sure I had my mom's views correct, so I asked her. To clarify, she says if a child is speaking ebonics she will explain there are different styles of speaking, and it depends on your audience. Speaking in that way is okay at home, for example, but in an academic setting the "correct" way is to go by the book.
"In economics, a public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods

I do not understand how medical goods can be considered public goods.(Or roads and security for that matters.)

Are you forgetting to account for the various interventions that account for rise in medical cost?

I believe I recall Medicare driven up demand, thus increasing cost due to people overusing Medicare. Insurance, instead of being used to cover emergency medical care, are now being used to cover medical visit and other regular expenses.

We also have a medical cartel driving up costs by limiting the supply of doctors. Patent medicine is also adding to the cost too.

Statistics are great and all, but we really should look into the unseen on why this is happening.
Nur Uddin Sabuj - Bangladesh | Facebook
I admit. I mod up for funny.
this provision is a market failure. As such, like transportation and armies and education, the service is best provided - on a micro level - in something other than a free market model.

Or, that the free market might possibly work well, but there is something else causing a market failure.
The accessibility features on the iPhone are constantly improving with each update to the iPhone OS and are quite impressive for what is an all-touch interface. While there are bugs and inaccessible applications, I have talked to and worked with visually impaired folks that love the iPhone as an alternative accessible phone to whatever else they were using before it. Obviously they can't just go and play whatever game or use any app they want, but for many apps the general interface is predictable and fairly simple to navigate and discover.

For the author of the above-linked article to claim that Apple's purposefully making voiceover suck to annoy the blind is a bit rich and ill-informed, given Apple's accessibility team want to help, are very helpful if you ever email them about issues (accessibility@apple.com), and could probably address most of those issues as best they can if they were informed of them. A true "fuck you" to the blind would be to not have included voiceover on the iPhone 3GS in the first place.
We haven't had a free market in US health care for years and years. So both you and your coworker are wrong.
> And your script probably sets things up differently from everyone else's :)

I don't doubt it. Much like how there is the occasional "this is how I handle managing multiple settings for different systems" blog post, people have come up with their own systems because Django provides none.

> But if you think it's a problem, why not publish whatever you use and encourage others to use it as well?

http://github.com/tvon/django-gig

Written for personal use, so...

There is also "create project" or "project template", I forget the exact name, but it's on bitbucket or github... and "paster" from zopeskel seems to have potential to do something like this but it may be too zope specific, I don't know.

There are ways to do it, but IMO it's something the framework should be handling. As it stands, "basic setup and configuration" is a much higher hurdle in Django than it is in Rails.

> (also, FWIW I don't have such a script -- a new site at work always simply inherits default settings from other stuff, and those defaults are set up to match how our production servers work)

Well, you don't have a script that builds things out in a certain way, but you have a system in place that handles project defaults.
Sure, but starting off the discussion by implying that Google is somehow less open than Apple or Microsoft is really just flamebait. If the Register were really interested in inciting change, they could use a headline like "Google May Be Open, But Keeps Community In The Dark".
What happens is that there are companies that will work on products like that, and then they will go on to sell said product for hundreds if not thousands of dollars (if not more) to justify the cost of designing and producing the product.

On the other hand, voiceover comes with all iPhone 3GSes and voiceover on Mac OS X is free and comes built into the OS (even during OS installs!). I guess that's Apple's way of telling blind people that Apple doesn't care about them and they should go buy other products..
Good read, thanks for sharing!
That doesn't make sense.

Wiki definition:

Market failures can be viewed as scenarios where individuals' pursuit of pure self-interest leads to results that are not efficient – that can be improved upon from the societal point-of-view.

In other words, the free market is the failure.
aging population throughout the developed world == rich blind old ppl.

i've seen simplified mobiles (look and work like a cordless home phone) in japan aimed squarely at this growing market.
What about the possibility of artificially high barrier to entry, arbitrary regulations some which increases the cost of productions and some which block out firms? What about insurance being used to pay for everyday medical expenses instead of being used in only emergency? What about laws regulating the price of insurance? What about the effects of government welfare program on supply and demand?
Sometime I wish FreeBSD and OpenBSD are more popular than Linux...
Conduct a controlled experiment. Spilt the world into two parallel universes. In one, give your Mum or technologically illiterate sister a Macbook, and in the other, a Dell Inspiron. You will most likely find a more positive experience with the MacBook. Computers aren't just for socially autistic engineering nerds.

This probably doesn't need repeating, but there are a lot of hackers out there who appreciate a UNIX OS that works out of the box, runs commercial software not available on Linux, and can easily sync with your iPhone.
You should stop and ask if a free market can work in providing health insurance. It doesn't work in funding local fire departments or police forces, for example.
This decision may be a little short-sighted. I have seen no proof that our political system ever worked any better in the past. During the Cold War, America constantly elected those perceived "less Communist", and invaded countries deemed as communist without much evidence [1], with political discourse almost completely unrelated to reality, and things turned out just fine (more or less).

The point about customer confidence stands, however.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#History_in...
2 - the disparity in prices shows that the free market just doesn't work for American Health Care

This is not intended as an attack on you, just in case it might sound that way, but: I wish people, when saying that "the market doesn't work for _____" would specify what their definition of "working" is. This is not a trivial issue!

Markets are distributed systems that optimize economies for... the kind of behaviors that succeed in the market (in some respects resembling biological evolution, only less stupid and short-sighted). External forces and constraints on a market change the parameters that get optimized, sometimes in unpredictable ways, and there's no such thing as a market without external constraints warping it.

Most of the time, when someone says "the market doesn't work" what they really mean is "I value parameters A, B, and C, but the market is not optimizing the economy to maximize those", but rarely do they indicate more than obliquely what those parameters might be.

I agree (as do many people) that the current system is pretty terrible. But without specifying what it should be like, it's hard to talk about good ways to fix it.
So it doesn't work as a phone? Yup, sounds like the iPhone. Zing!

Seriously though, it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to hook in a GSM radio and make it into a true phone. Looks like there's a kit at SparkFun (using an ATMega chip, no less) that could be a starting point: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
Apple is the only company I know of even trying to make an accessible modern SmartPhone. It's been less than 6 months since accessibility features were introduced. I think patience is reasonable in this case. Apple is almost certainly developing these accessibility features at a financial loss.
Defining a public good is a method of classification based on opinion, often having little to do with a natural state. Few things in this world are truly public goods. Hell, even air can be excluded with a little thought.

I'm interpreting the OP to be suggesting that choosing to define health care as a public good has obvious benefits that outweigh the notion that it should be left to the free market.

You are coming from an opposite view that clearly sees little benefit in drawing any lines past the natural norm.

Given that there is basically no country on the planet that operates in this method - spare maybe Somalia - I am assuming that the true definition of a Public Good is not the intent.
The argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake.

This is the very epitome of attacking a strawman. The article didn't come close to arguing that "no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake."

As a matter of fact, the author specifically and painstakingly drew a distinction between what he considers simply mistake-based variants of languages (which do exist) and new language dialects with different, but well-specified grammars (of which he considers AAVE to be one).
Great point! In health insurance, markets should work to minimize administrative costs - to minimize the amount people have to pay to be insured (cost) and maximize benefits. Currently, the market incentives are to do the exact opposite, while innovating on customer confusion, public relations, and lobbying power in Washington.
My sister just paid $2600 for an MRI. I just paid $860 for an MRI. Apparently, there are other places a few miles away where I could have paid $400 less for the same MRI.

In Japan, the same MRI would cost $160.
Person.com: Free online dating, chat and webcams
I think this is all a problem with terminology. The market "doesn't work" or "isn't allowed to exist" in the first place?
IPhone Owners More Likely to Pony Up for Digital Content
I actually don't believe that we have a "free market" for healthcare in the US. My coworker apparently believes there should be.
Mingw makes Windows civilized AND non-slow.
"bounce" is slang. There's nothing syntactically distinct in that sentence from Standard English, which is the discussion of the article.
I think you mean 0.7% of people, which is not necessarily a small market. Developing a sophisticated consumer electronics product like the iphone may be expensive, but developing a few software apps for it isn't necessarily, especially if you can dominate the market for the accessible phone.

That said, I would agree that there are more compelling markets out there. I wouldn't be surprised if most accessibility developers have altruistic motives.
I'm confused. First off, let's accept that what Bray is talking about is healthcare. The problem is that there is a plurality of voters who seem to be saying they oppose the current legislation making their way through both Houses.

On the other hand, not only do a majority of Americans want healthcare reform (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/curr...) but most say they are happy with their own plans. Thus it's inaccurate to say that "a voting majority of Americans apparently want their government to provide them" [with healthcare] if in fact he's referring to healthcare.

What confuses and scares me about the current legislation is that it assumes that everything that both the private and public sector in the US has done is wrong with the aim towards radical change for everyone. This ignores the multitide of things the US had done right - from healthcare innovation and research to even process innovation (e.g. Ambulatory surgical centers - an example can be seen in India though there are many in the US as well http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125875892887958111.html).

There are those who argue that the healthcare system in the US is an example of failed markets ignoring the government incentives that favors employer provided healthcare, that the US spends more per capita on public healthcare than the Canadian government does, and the rather high costs of malpractice insurance. But let's say we even accept that it is a market failure and market failure alone, isn't there an assumption here that the US government wouldn't do even worse? (Again in the context that the government already controls Medicare)

One of the basic policy arguments for public and universal healthcare is that it could encourage entrepreneurship. If that's the goal, why then does the Senate bill dismantle Health Savings Plans that effectively allow for coverage portability? Why force the additional taxes on businesses that employ more than a small handful of people - effectively discouraging hiring? Why is the CBO estimating that both plans would place an even greater healthcare burden on the economy than currently exists?

If legislators are serious about reforms, why would they first not attempt to propose changes that optimize existing spending and changes that encourage competition rather than rushing monolithic pieces of legislation that few have read or understand? It would seem that the biggest beneficiary of existing legislation is not the uninsured who may or may not end up being covered by existing legislation but the SEIU.
First off, you've got a great point here, and I agree with just about all of it. But I do take exception to one point:

> (in some respects [markets resemble] biological evolution, only less stupid and short-sighted)

LESS short-sighted? When all of our markets are optimizing for 6- or even 3-month returns? When companies are structured in long-term suboptimal ways because you need to maximize profits for the short term to keep investors happy, or the people at the top get fired. cf the infamous quote from Citibank's former CEO, Chuck Prince: "While the music's playing, you've gotta dance." [This said in answer to being asked why he continued his investment strategy despite knowing it to be unsound.]
How hard would it have been for your sister to go to the $400 place and pay $400?

If the answer is "very", then you don't have a market.

I consider the idea that the US has a free market in health care laughable. How "free market" something is is a continuum, not a binary distinction, but my ability to price discriminate or choose among competing insurance providers is effectively nil. I sometimes wonder how much of the problem could be fixed if we took the simple step of stopping making it virtually necessary to get health insurance from your employer for tax reasons and then just see what happens for a couple of years.

(But naw, too simple, let's pass a 2000 page law.)
Node.JS JSConf EU Video Released
Milton Friedman seemed to think it would be a good idea:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3459466.html
Believe me, VB was not my choice. :)

My boss was the kind of guy who wrote the kind of code you are talking about. In fact, he would tell me to not waste time making the code "pretty," just get things done quickly. I simply ignored him, and wrote clean, well designed code anyway. :)

I always write in the most productive language I can, given the choice. But it is still possible to design and structure your code well in even the worst languages.

I understand the concerns IT has about "cowboy coders." But we're talking about people who didn't even understand the relative precedence of addition and multiplication, in this case. So this was more than just wanting to by pass bureaucracy, I'm honestly not sure whether they were capable of implementing the mathematical models my boss wanted. (Not that I was a math genius, but I had mostly mastered operator precedence.)
Sometimes I think half the opensource advocats are offering me tweaks and utilities to make Windows and OS X more like {star}nix so everything can be The One True Way, and the other half are trying to convince me that all the {star}nix variants are life changingly different and charmingly unique.
African American culture is decimating African culture, IMO. I am from East Africa and these days it's rare to find any of our old art forms. As far back as the 70s, we had Reggae replace most of the indigenous pop music, and these days the reggae is giving way to hiphop.
"In Japan, the same MRI would cost $160."

The upfront cost would be $160, right? I'd prefer to subsidize healthcare for people who actually need help. You and I are probably around the same place economically speaking, so why don't both of us just pay for our own healthcare?
C++ isn't an easy language, but it's not that hard. Using a reasonable coding style it's possible to make very solid applications.
(loop for x from 1 to 365 summing x) ==> 66795
If a company asks you for your password that doesn't mean they store it; they could be storing a hash.