skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"and healthcare, for all it's importance, is nowhere near being as important as, say, free political speech."

I assume from this statement that you are either a) healthy and/or b) fully capable of paying for all you and your families medical needs - both now and in the future.

"I'm unaware of any right that involves making other people take care of me by producing medicines, providing services, food, housing me, and tending to my disabilities."

Australian doctors are highly paid. Their salaries are paid by every Australian tax payer whether healthy or sick. By sharing the burden all of society benefits.

You would be much more inclined to agree that healthcare is a basic human right if you were both sick and unable to afford treatment.

The standard of living in Australia is as good or better than in the US. My medical costs are $0. Regardless of whether I am visiting the doctor for a flu shot or having life saving heart surgery.

Better systems are possible.
Well, the above isn't a comprehensive solution, but it should help a good bit. Here's why I believe the above suggestions would help the current state of things at minimal cost and downside -

Doctor's fees: When something costs a lot and the supply is artificially restricted, lessening those restrictions on supply usually makes the cost go down.

Medical insurance: When a good is tax free if purchased through a specific administrative process, but taxed if purchased independently, you're going to see the process utilized and administrative costs go up. If you offer the same benefit without the required administration, you would expect administrative costs to go down.

Drug costs: The more trials and greater burden of proof on a drug company before releasing a drug to market, the longer it will take to get to market and more it will cost to get to market. If you can reduce the requirements without compromising safety, drugs will most likely get a little cheaper and get to market faster.

I think a lot of people want a comprehensive solution, and this is not a comprehensive solution - but it should help quite a lot at not much cost, and it isn't particularly politically charged in one direction or the other.

There's complex problems, but if there's a simple way to take a few medium-sized dents out of the problem that's likely to work with relatively low cost or downside, I reckon that ought to be pursued.
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getting high with code to earn some money.
It's clearly an overkill, but gotta admire the approach.
There is a middle ground here. It is possible to provide universal healthcare without dismantling private markets under the guise of calling it a public good. The Swiss do it (and at a cost lower with better quality than the Canadian or American systems) - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/health/policy/01swiss.html.... What is increasingly clear however, is that there are a number of models like the Canadian one which are increasingly unsustainable and unwieldy.
The American Healthcare is a guild and cartel system, not a free market: http://intellectual-detox.com/2009/09/10/the-perfect-healthc...

Jingoism has replaced discourse. American Democracy no longer works. It's just a doppleganger of its former self.

What in the world makes you think American Democracy ever worked? Or that it was ever less jingoistic? Ever read an account of 19th century politics? http://books.google.com/books?id=8KwXAAAAYAAJ&dq=satans+...
Well, I wouldn't say the current speakers of AAVE are literally trying to speak English properly and making a mistake. I would say that the people who created it were. And I would say that the people who speak it now suffer for it just as if they were. Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect.

So I guess her argument that mistakes + tradition = dialect seems silly to me. Even if its true by the dictionary definition of "dialect" it's a harmful viewpoint to take.
That did not strike me as something I would say, so I checked on SearchYC and found who actually said it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794374

My experience on healthcare in Japan is largely positive, except for the one time I really needed it. (And I lived through that, though it was a bit touch and go for a while.)

Don't get me started on dental care, though. I had a business trip to Chicago recently and used the opportunity to drop by my parents' dentist for a long overdue routine cleaning. My conversation with them was almost comical: I kept offering to pay them money and they kept asking me how they could help me find a way to get insurance to pay for it. (It ended up costing about five times what my last cleaning in Japan did -- and would have been cheap at twice the price. Don't get me started on Japanese dentistry.)
I mentioned most of the ideas in your post in my own post. I don't consider them persuasive.
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What's all this nonsense about Katas?
That's exactly what we do... http://www.neybor.com.

There are many companies that offer such a service today, and it is starting to help. Syndication is what will eventually allow the MLS monopoly to be broken I think...

Five years ago probably 95% of homes found by buyers online were found via MLS search sites. But syndication has started to shift this number lower and distribute it among many other sites (trulia, zillow, craigslist, etc etc).

As the % of online shoppers viewing true MLS data drops, brokers will continue to syndicate their listings to other sites, which will accelerate the shift away from MLS reliance even further.

After a while, the monopoly will be broken and then you will start to see radical shifts like you describe where real estate agents are used for their professional services -- advice, negotiation, paperwork, and expertise, and NOT as an overpriced access fee to the MLS data.
CodeWriMo
Basically, the current system is a local optimum for a large number of powerful interests. Also, the beneficiaries of a current system all are organized, while the beneficiaries of some major reform are not organized, thus their lobbying power is greatly muted.

If you're interested, I wrote a blog post where I lay out in detail why the politics of healthcare reform solves for complicated solutions: http://intellectual-detox.com/2009/09/10/the-perfect-healthc... I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Also, I highly recommend "Government's End" by Jonathan Rauch which is the single best book to understand Washington. It talks a lot about this issue.

The core problem is that the structure of our political system is fundamentally pro-entropy. Madison was completely wrong about factions. Unfortunately, the only way to defeat entropy is with concentrated authority. But that is anathema to the American ideology. So the entropy continues to increase unabated.
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Composite Types
Dumbing Down Programming?
The main goal is to produce a Ruby implementation with a good high-level design and an accessible implementation. This will make it easier to optimize the implementation, and to experiment with changes to the implementation or the language. Unlike some other Ruby implementations, Rubinius also intends to be compatible with C extensions written for MRI.
Microsoft Confirm IE9 Development
Hey, it's a Lisp that allows something akin to [false become: true] in Smalltalk. That's awesome.
Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story
Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’
I'm surprised that Arabic and Hebrew aren't in the same category.

(disclaimer/foonote: I'm a native speaker of Arabic)
UK Police Arresting People Just To Add To DNA Database?
Train Your Mind
The phrase "love me, or hate me, but don't ignore me" is a serious marketing mistake, in any context. It's a transparently selfish cry for attention. Rather than offering something great to the audience, you're trying to win pity points by subtly accusing them of poor judgement: You should be paying attention to X, but you aren't!

Believe me, if people wanted to pay attention to your project, they would find a way to do so. And if your project is being politely but firmly ignored, and you're not getting the message, it is not the audience's problem. They've responded to your message. That response is somehow not getting through to you.

Perl needs no more criticism. Even the criticism of Perl is old news. Yegge's essay, cited elsewhere on this thread, is five years old. I suspect he has little to add to it, and neither do I. I'm glad Perl's users are happy and productive, I was really grateful for it ten years ago, and I have seen nothing that makes me regret my decision to stop using it.
12 upvotes without a single comment.
Post some recent instructions if you get it working? I had numerous problems with networking (which I solved) and swap/RAM overhead (which I didn't) when I tried installing to my Eee 900.
the announcement from Mininova: http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2009/11/26/mininova-limits...
There's a lot more to building a university spin-off company and a successful product than just completing the original research. The research grant is like seed funding in this case. The university benefits from its involvement, which means its students benefit. Not to mention that the possibility of starting a spin-off company is a motivator to do great research. Do you really want to take all this away?

Sure, a lot of research ends up just sitting there, unused. Some of this is because of licensing, but not always. Most research results are quite experimental, and just can't be used in their raw form to make a product. They are useful for further research though. And no one is disallowing researchers to study and cite previous work.

I'm not saying the system is perfect. But it might be better to proceed with small changes, rather than trying to revolutionize research overnight.
I suppose since the Smithsonian is backwards looking, they would, in 1989 have no idea how big the Internet would be come even just a few short years later.

How valuable that thing is... and it just sits there, unguarded. Humble.
This is called new world order.

The end of the any type freedom we had left. One government to rule the world. One government elected by the bankers and corporations and global slavery for the rest of us.
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Subject lines: Amazon's lessons on discounts and frontloading
Almost every single "market failure" in the economic literature is really an opportunity for a business plan.

All Arrow's paper shows is that certain naive structures for health insurance might not work out so well. But there are plenty of other structures that might work well. For example, here is the design for a better type of healthcare company:

- The company by contract defines that 80% of all premiums must be applied to reimbursement, the other 20% of revenue pays for administration, marketing, and profits.

- As a result, the company cannot profit by denying care. If they deny care, that money must be spent on another patient.

- Since the money must be spent by contract, the company will be incentivized to spend the money in the way that maximizes the total health of the pool, so that they can attract more customers. The incentives of the insurance company and the patients are actually aligned.

Unfortunately, in my state, and in most states, the above structure for a healthcare company is illegal. Regulations prevent it. So I hardly see healthcare as an example of "market failure" when regulations prevent the types of business plans that would actually work.
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I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian, Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hakka. But what other languages did you have in mind that seemed to be rated as surprisingly easy by contrast with Arabic?

Disclaimer: I am almost completely uninformed about other languages beyond assorted superficial details about a handful. That said, I would have expected Arabic to be of no greater relative difficulty than, say, Hindi, Persian, Hebrew, Mongolian, or such.

I mostly expected Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese to be of greatest relative difficulty, from what little I know about those languages, and would have expected Arabic (and many other languages) to be in the second category.
The real hard part of Arabic is the morphology. It's "irregular", both in the human sense that there's all sorts of horrible exceptions to ridiculous numbers of rules, and in the compsci sense that you cannot recognise/produce the inflected forms of nouns and verbs using a finite state automaton/transducer. (Though, that's true for all the Afroasiatic languages including Amharic, Hebrew, and Hausa, but the FSI claims those are only "Level II" languages).

Also IMO Arabic phonology is a lot harder than either Chinese or Korean. (Chinese has tones, Korean has tensed versions of the same consonants we have in English, but Arabic has the pharyngeal and glottal consonants, completely unlike anything in English). On the other hand, Georgian's worse.

Finally, if you take Arabic in a school, they're going to teach you Modern Standard Arabic AKA fusha, which is basically in the same position that Latin was in 14th-century Europe: useful if you like to do nothing but read, useless if you actually want to understand what people are saying.
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Looks like we're nearing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
But who then will protect us from tall people?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/26/kent_police_tall_exp...
The ideas in my post are barely mentioned in the last paragraph of your post: that's why I wrote it. I think you underestimate the extent to which being able to speak and write in standard English is important. That's what pg implied in his original post, and he's right. Maybe standard English is a "fashion," as you put it, but that's not very useful: what's more useful is to note that being able to master this "fashion" is important in terms of communicating effectively.
Hindi and Persian are in the Indo-European language family, which provides a ton of similarities and possibilities for innate understanding of the underlying grammatical structure, which is not so much the case for Semitic languages (Arabic in particular)...
There's an interesting page linked there, wikipedia's internal Newbie Treatment Study. Good to see they're at least considering they might have a problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newbie_treatment_at_C...
I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making.

Well, it's a feature of politics-in-general, not legislating as such. One could probably observe the same dynamics arising semi-spontaneously in any context where a group with a diffuse distribution of influence has to make a collective decision. It's the old "design by committee" problem, just writ very large when we're talking about the US federal government.

Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature?

That's more of a value judgment than I'm prepared to make. I'd call it an inevitability, for decisions made in certain environments.
I know this is obvious, but... Find out which of your professors work in this area. Then go talk to them, and ask them about their work. Get involved with a research project.

Learning things from books is great (and you'll still have to do a lot of that), but there is no substitute for networking. Approaching professors can be intimidating, but you'll have to do it if you want to go to grad school. Might as well start now.

In my experience, the profs who are really good at what they do don't act arrogant and aren't dismissive of students. If anything, they get really excited talking about their research, and you'll have a hard time leaving their office :) If you do encounter someone who is arrogant, that tells you something about them (you don't want to be their grad student). However, don't mistake a busy prof for an arrogant one. Sometimes you just have to be persistent.
Kind of loses its touch when it's downscaled badly, resulting in ugly aliasing along the diagonal line in the actual resulting layout.
This juvenile practise of downvoting simply because one disagrees does not change the fact that legislation != regulation, in fact one can legislate to remove regulation.
And btw, the Community Reinvestment Act was introduced in 1977, I doubt it played a major influence in the GFC of 2008.
In 2000 regulation was removed for credit default swaps, Lehman, AIG, Bear-Sterns,FM & FM and others all went under due to overload of toxic credit default swaps. Proper regulation could have avoided that... now we have the undesired result of Government owning some of these failed creatures.. which is even worse than government regulations.
I have a copy of an great-but-ancient book called "Functional Programming: Application and Implementation" (Peter Henderson, edited by CAR Hoare).

If you're interested in this implementation, you'll find that book very interesting, and quite similar I think (based on reading the link).

(The book has a now-amusing appendix too where it lists the "object" code for the compiler in sexp-syntax, presuming that you'd have no other way to bootstrap other than typing that in :)
The author should also cover Hypertable, as it is also a popular Bigtable implementation -- although unlike HBase, it's an entire native C++ implementation.
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Is Perl6 backward compatible?

Because what I really hate about perl is how you end up changing how it works by assigning to a variable named something like $@_, or dozens of similarly non-obviously named variables.

In the mean time, I guess I will just stick to ruby.
Yes there is.

1) Crawl the entire web
2) Assume that a link to a page means it is interesting in some way
3) Compute the link graph
4) Pages that are pointed to the most are the most interesting

(More advanced versions of this algorithm may implement the following steps: 2a): Discover spamming, 2b) Work out methods to combat it).

(Actually, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm is probably better because it builds in topic specificity, which allows it to match better match an individuals interests)
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the US invaded The Maritimes, where I live.

In 1917 Halifax was devastated when two munitions ships collided causing a 3 Kiloton non-nuclear explosion (another interesting story) which resulted in a lot of eye injuries from flying glass since people looked out through windows at the burning ships when the explosion happened.

Boston sent help and ever since Halifax sends the city a Christmas tree.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if soldiers from Boston who would certainly have vivid memories of the assistance, were to participate in dropping poison gas on the same people they helped ten or fifteen years later.
Thank you. I'm very encouraged, though, that you did something so quickly. It's a data point to help me clarify that first step which I hope to get to work on in the near future.

PS: Can someone give me a link to the original discussion where the app was reviewed? Thx.
If you enjoy interesting, just-crazy-enough-to-work, will-never-actually-happen solutions to the health care problem, take a look at this one: http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html

the author of that piece has some interesting perspectives on the issue.
A company called "Casady & Greene" actually created iTunes. It was called SoundJam MP and it was pretty cool. Then Apple bought it and turned it into iTunes. (Just SoundJam and the employees who worked on it, not C&G as a whole. C&G declared bankruptcy, and then Apple hired some of their remaining employees if not all.)
State of the Mobile Web report
Considering that the guy goes on to slam everything Apple in the comments (including saying you have to buy a peripheral to use more than one mouse button), I'm taking this whole thing with a grain of salt.
Anyone fancy explaining? :-)
The debunkers are cultish because the proponents are cultish. Just like atheists are cultish in response to cultish cults.

If reducing delta wave sleep by 10% significantly decreases performance on memory and reasoning tests, why should reducing delta sleep by 90% fail to decrease performance?

Lots of studies are done on sleep, but they are never as extreme as polyphasic because it would be considered unethical to perform those studies. Those few insane people like me who actually did go polyphasic don't get scientifically tested.

It did work for me but I recognized that my performance had decreased because at the time I was in memorization-oriented schooling and using Anki to manage my memorization tasks. With the help of Anki, I could see quite clearly that my memorization abilities had decreased.

It was also never a natural state. It was a constant state of heightened autonomic response - fight or flight. Especially at nighttime, my body was surging with corticosteroids. This stress response is what provides the capability to stay awake so long, but it comes at the price of high-level thinking and memorization.

Typically in nature, humans will adopt polyphasic sleep in times of war and other extremely stressful situations. This is adaptive because their life is threatened. This is not the case for the modern knowledge worker.

There is tons of science on sleep. The polyphasic people base their theory on the outdated and discredited idea that we only need REM sleep. This has been categorically disproven by modern sleep researchers. Slow wave sleep provides many benefits, the most clear being improved memory but also better performance on other cognitive tasks.
Wow, I bet that would be the www.wishbass.com Wishnevsky -- I actually have one of his basses; alas, it's too neck-heavy for me to play comfortably. But then, it was a one-off prototype based on a crazy idea of mine (how about a bass guitar that you can bow?) Some day, I will buy one of his more "regular" basses.
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A basic human right is not the same thing as a shared moral obligation. The language of "rights" is often reserved for "categorically permitted acts", such as the right to think and speak as you wish.

A lot of people are resistant to using the language of "rights" in the context of "complicated systems that impose duties and burdens on the people who implement them". Even assuming that it is the duty and obligation of a moral, prosperous society to provide for the health of its members, many people would still not term that a right.
AFAIK Claudio Stampi is the only person to test polyphasic directly because since then it has been considered unethical to directly test polyphasic. (The Geneva Convention considers it torture, afterall)

See my reply here as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963502