skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Somehow, I think there's a difference between eating filet mignon and being treated for cancer. I could eat a good steak every day, but I wouldn't want chemotherapy unless I was pretty sure I had cancer in the first place."

The point isn't cancer surgery. The point is that right now, if you have a small cough or are feeling bad, but don't really need to go to the doctor, you won't. When the government takes over health care, you will start to have a perceived value that there is an unlimited supply of health care and will go to the hospital more than you should. This, in turn, will flood our hospitals and make it difficult for everyone to get the care that they need.

This is why there either needs to be a limit per person per year or a fee per visit. If not, I don't see how the system can possibly be any more efficient than what we have now.

"Most people are just trying to get the treatment necessary to keep them at a high level of function. Why should anyone be denied that? Almost no one goes into a hospital and demands thousands of dollars worth of unnecessary tests for diseases they couldn't possibly have-- and those who do are often mentally ill hypochondriacs, given inappropriate treatment because (surprise!) health insurers are generally shitty about MH issues."

The US has tons of programs for people that are poor. Also, you will never be turned away for care..you just need to pay for it.

A government run program for children was tested in Hawaii and it failed, how will a much larger version of the exact same thing be any different?

We need to bring some logic and thinking into the conversation rather than just pure emotion. Otherwise, we will end up a bankrupted country.
This is a great idea for marketing:

Provide a walk-through of your product on an example client showing how it can be useful.
Thanks all, will remember this in the future.
Depends on which talent you're REALLY hiring and concerned with. Are you hiring the director/producer, or the staff.

Provided that the project got proper oversight and herding by the creative director, it does not really matter, IMO, who writes the HTML and diddles the Photoshop buttons.
So, why are you downvoting, eh? Because I used the word "stupid"? If that's the case, you're stupid right along with the article. Thanks for your attention.
> Seems as though the only way to move such a property is to offer it so far below market

You don't understand the term "market".

> What's worse, when buyers today see the prices of McMansions plunging, they expect to see the price of a well patterned home (that may have cost 5x - 8x as much to build) also plunge, despite the more complex home already having a replacement cost higher than its asking price, price of materials and labor having risen.

There's a cost associated with being "goofy". If that cost exceeds the benefits, perhaps you should reconsider your decisions.
Squad - a web-based collaborative code editor
Intel research page here: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm

Interestingly, it's x86 compatible, although the individual cores are only around atom-powered. It's built out of 24 'tiles' of 2 cores each with a 25gB/s internal bus, and: Each tile (2 cores) can have its own frequency, and groupings of four tiles (8 cores) can each run at their own voltage.

Very much a lab project right now, but impressive nonetheless.
I was really hoping this was about some 419 variant...

We would like to steal ships worth $x, but to do so we need boats and guns and fake papers, which cost $y. We presume in most cases we will be able to ransom for $x/10 of which you will get $y*10. Please send the money to... and so on.
There is actually not much of a difference. Filet Mignon makes you marginally happier, and cancer care (mostly) makes you live only marginally longer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11...

Incidentally, last time we did a study to measure it, we found that at least 30% of health care consumed by patients is unnecessary.

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

The conclusion of the study is that health care you are unwilling to pay for out of pocket doesn't help more than it harms (on average).

A specific example of care people don't need but will get: mammograms. They are pointless (benefits don't outweigh harms) for people under 50. I mentioned this to a few women I know, but all said they intend to continue getting them.

[wow, down to -1 in 20 minutes from citing an expert opinion and an experiment. I should go back to reddit.]
How to Fix Health Care - 3 Simple Reforms
I understand what you're saying, and potentially agree with you, but why do you feel that that's the "best" way? Best with regards to what measure? What objective?
Before Latin American countries privatized their telecom companies, it would often take weeks or even months to get a new phone line. Despite being owned by the government and not operated to generate a profit, a monopoly service resulted in extremely poor service.

I think it's a good comparison to Google. The big G can say "We're not being evil!" all it wants. But the fact is that it has a near monopoly on search engine advertising which allows it to treat its advertisers awfully. Imagine a radio station randomly pulling ads without a proper explanation. What would happen? The radio station next door would get the ad dollars.

Try calling Google Adwords phone support (trust me it exists, my friend works there.) You won't find the number listed on their site. I googled and found it on some obscure forum. I was answered with a teleprompt, asking me for my adwords customer number. I'm not a high roller (couple hundred bucks a month) so after the system identifed me it dropped my call. I had to use their crappy email system, where I was answered by a cut-and-paste response that didn't answer my question.

I've had no trouble reaching Yahoo and MSN's search engine marketing groups by phone.
If you are going to be the only programmer on the project then your reasons make sense. However, if you are going to have other people on the projects - then your reasons do not make sense from a longer term point of view. How many lisp programmers do you have out there as compared to python or ruby programmers? If you and the founders decide to go your separate ways how likely is the project going to be continued in lisp?

It seems like a somewhat precarious decision to let you use Lisp for this project. There's nothing supremely special about the problem you are attacking that warrants Lisp (outside of your comfort level which you clarified very clearly in your post).

Perhaps I'm just old and cynical but I've been on too many projects where the first (and therefore "lead") developer chose a particular language and architecture that in the long term was not sustainable.
WebGL Goes Mobile (WebGL in Firefox on Nokia N900)
Of course the grantee wants it. However, if there's no grantor, it doesn't matter what the grantee wants.

> Given the concomitant concentration of power, how do you prevent regulatory capture and the general perversion of government?

A govt that doesn't regulate isn't subject to regulatory capture. A "not govt" that tries to regulate can usually be ignored.
Her email address was not out in the open. It took some digging through basecamp for me to figure it out. My main issue was that I looked through the portfolio of the person they were going to have to do it and she wasn't any good.

I also didn't really think it was worth letting her attempt to do it and then fighting them at the end of I wasn't happy.
But that would be a crime! Besides, why would you want to go without the government's valuable information?
A republican or democratic (small-r/d) government does. North Korea essentially has government by fiat, and its parliament is purely decorative.
I find the list quite narrow in focus to be honest.
I guess China could carpet-nuke NK if they ever got tired of aiding them.
only valid inside the states :(
A friend of mine did tech support for Amex from home for years. She would take her purse downstairs to her office everyday as part of her going to work ritual.
Yep, you're within your rights to panic and flee.

And, yep, you may have overreacted. Companies subcontract work. That's what they do. Among other things, this is how firms train and audition new people -- by hiring them as subcontractors.

If you pay Company X for the work, you get work with Company X's name on it. If something goes wrong, you get to blame the whole company -- they don't get to dodge the blame by passing it on to their subcontractor. But, in return, you shouldn't expect the right to micromanage the internal affairs of the company.

Of course, it's also possible that you dodged a bullet. Who knows? If the contractor couldn't convince you to stay on as a client, using arguments like the ones above, that might be a sign that you weren't likely to get along well together. Client-contractor relationships are a tricky business. Often you are required to make gut-level decisions.
Raises the question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Modern_usa...)

Though I guess I should give up at this point.
This is really common in the design world, especially in this crappy economy. Design firms don't have steady demand right now, and a lot of them have laid off former full-time designers, only to pull them back in on contract when work comes through the door. I have friends who are/were in exactly this situation.

I think you probably overreacted. Why don't you trust the professional designers to choose their employees? What does the employee's tax status have to do with the designs they deliver?
I sent myself a love note. I can't wait to get it in the mail!
Probably, someone with money contacted Google and asked them to do it. StudioBriefing did news articles about the entertainment industry, so it probably had pissed off some company or other high-rolling entity.
The article is at least simplifying the issue.

IANAL but the license for the product you bought has to specifically mention, that you are not allowed to break the DRM, but there are exceptions, for example you are allowed to break it for interoperability and last I read about this it specifically mentioned “to play on another OS” as a reason.

Even if the license does prevent you from breaking the DRM you can seek to get it removed if you have a reason for needing to copy the material (non-commercially). The vendor has 4 weeks to reply to such request, after which you are free to break it yourself, if the vendor does not reply.

But as said, IANAL — maybe some of all those who down-voted my original comment can help? ;)
Are you serious? A written "thank you for the interview" note might be uncommon in the US but it's pretty much conventional interview wisdom. And if it is uncommon that's all the more reason to do it: you'll stand out.

Do you truly think a written thank you note would be a negative in the UK?

When I interview candidates for anything but relatively entry level positions I'll generally write off a candidate that doesn't bother to at least send a follow up email. The interview process is among the most personally significant forms of professional communication. If you're not thorough and don't take the initiative to follow up when interviewing, how are you going to behave when you have much less of a personal stake in the matter? (This is, by the way, also a good reason to make sure your resume/cv is as perfect if you can make it. If you don't bother to proofread your resume, what is your business communication going to look like?)
And in the US, you get the privilege of paying for the paper on which the denial letter was printed... and, to make it better, the bureaucrat's salary.

If you buy private health insurance, you're literally paying the salary of the asshole who pores over people's medical records looking for reasons to deny care (e.g. undisclosed insomnia prescription from 1982 as a "pre-existing condition").
Yes and no. There's a school of thought that the player should be allowed to play a game any way they please, that play is a creative process and the game is a box of tools to make an enjoyable experience.

The player makes their own fun by setting themselves goals and challenges that match their personalities and skill sets (that they find enjoyable). As their skills develop (or they simply get bored) they naturally find new, different, more challenging things to do until the game can no longer satisfy them.

Zynga provide a free framework and a whole load of extras to enable people to have fun. You can progress for free according to a number of pre-designed interpretations of how you can progress in the game, or you can short-cut for cash and do the bits you really enjoy, and you spend more as you explore different options. It practically screams "revenue stream".

Obviously it's all set up to make loads of cash, but I see it as enabling fun rather than a scam or "accomplishment lite".
There are, obviously, far more ruby/python programmers. But, at the very most, I might only ever need a dozen Lisp programmers and I already know 20 that I would love to work with. Lisp is even pretty easy to pick up if you're smart know other dynamically typed, functional, and OO languages.

As a point of reference, ITA Software has no trouble hiring 100s of Lisp programmers.

Minor correction: I am a founder - and if I were to leave (while my co-founders continued), I'd make a point to find my replacement first.
What is "probable" about that theory?
People absolutely go to the hospital to seek treatment thy don't need. We see it in the US already - people flooding emergency rooms with the sniffles looking for antibiotics. That's entirely the reason triage exists, to seperate out the people looking for clinic care and the people with real emergencies.

You are correct about cancer and major surgeries - almost no one is going to elect to have these if they can avoid it. The only exception is obeseity cases where people would rather have a gastric bypass then have to suffer through diet and exercise.
"and it ran as fast as C++" (emphasis added)
It's certainly not a monopoly by choice. I think the Google big heads know how much they can get shot at if they become a monopoly.

It just so happens that everyone else is really really shitty.
It seems to be working rather well in a large number of other first-world countries (I'm speaking from experience - I'm British, and my wife is half-French and grew up in France. Now we live in the US where we enjoy just about everything except for the healthcare system).

"single-payer gives consumers no incentive to consume less"

Having been fortunate enough to live in a country with a single-payer system, I never saw the kind of over-consumption you're hinting at.
I don't think you overreacted. I would find it difficult to trust a consultant who pulled a bait-and-switch on me.

An alternative to firing them might have been to re-negotiate their fees based on the less known designer, or to defer payment until the job was finished to your satisfaction.

But given the breach of trust, I don't think canceling the contract was out of line. Especially if staying with them would require extra oversight and heartburn.
That site, and implicitly, your post, are negligent of the fact that things with precise formal meanings often creep into the realm of being figures of speech. When someone says, "It doesn't follow that..." they don't mean, "there exists no proof which verifies A -> B" they mean, "that doesn't make sense".

There is certainly a place for precise terminology, but it's not necessary in casual conversation.
LogBlog The One Supreme Court Case You Should Pay Attention To This Session
Twitter being used by Churches
I don't see how this answers the question.

There is nothing to prevent a sufficiently influential grantee-to-be from creating a grantor. In fact, I believe this is the origin of many regulatory bodies and government powers.
This has been shown empirically to be false. Patients will consume medicine with no health benefits if it is free, but not if they must pay for it.

http://www.rand.org/health/projects/hie/
An First Look at some Lean Startup Metrics Numbers
"The idea and the founder's résumé would then need to pass muster with a government or industry-appointed board of venture capitalists, financiers, or technology experts"

This is the fatal flaw in the program. The whole reason startup culture exists is that we don't have a way of knowing in advance what ideas are really worth pursuing, short of giving them a try. But this program would create a board of experts whose job it would be to try to predict which ideas had a reasonable chance at success.

The obvious outcome would be a huge distortion in the kinds of startups foreign nationals would found. The value of a green card is far higher than the expected value of a startup, so the process would turn into a bad example of grantsmanship - trying to tailor your proposal to what you think the committee wants to see, and then making sure your startup stays solvent long enough for the permanent residency to come through.

Rather than taking real risks and trying to innovate, the role startups are supposed to take in our economy, we would be encouraging an extremely conservative startup culture, whose real purpose would be to secure green card status for the founders lucky enough to get in the program. How likely are you to bet the company if the consequence of failure is getting kicked out of the country?
I have zero interest in being an (over)achiever, driven, etc. And I think that's fine / there's nothing wrong with me. I also don't think there's anything wrong with people who are (over)achievers unless they feel achieving is "better" and view themselves (and others) as failures unless they have (over)achieved.

Spending 2.5 years finishing college and 1.5 years doing something else is no better/worse then spending 4 years finishing college. It only matters that you lived a good life during those four years. I believe "There's no speed limit" is bad general advice. It's good for the driven overachiever types, which I believe are a niche. But for most people it focuses them excessively on future payoffs and makes them miserable when the don't/can't overachieve.

It's the difference between working all the time so one day you can own your very own rosegarden(and likely never do) and taking the time to stop and smell the roses today.
I have seen numbers anywhere between 15 to 30% as the overhead / billing cost of healthcare in the USA. It depends on what you call overhead, but pre approval for a procedure is not free. Neither is 3 or 4 letters back and forth between the healthcare provider and the insurance company.

PS: Many small doctors’ offices have 1/3 of their staff devoted to dealing with insurance and billing issues.
I agree. It would have been interesting if they would have explained
why they thought this.

Just before our exit, we ran our company from a condo. Here are some
pictures under 'Environment'[1]. One major upside for us working in
residential space was the cost. Electricity, rent/condo fees, parking,
and internet fees are all less expensive than commercial rates. As well
owning residential space is far less expensive than owning commercial
space.

[1] http://www.igeejo.com/blog/default/photos
Ask HN: Enterprise SaaS UI Design resources
I'm currently working on an enterprise SaaS application that is targeted towards both medium and large companies.

Anyone have guidelines, contacts, recommendations for UI design.
What Bilski Means To High-Tech Companies
That's no so good when that company is really Zynga and a search for Xynga doesn't really take you anywhere interesting other than this post
Do you truly think a written thank you note would be a negative in the UK?

As someone who interviews a lot, yes, definitely. It is wildly inappropriate. Pre-hiring, apart from the actual interviews obviously, every interaction with a candidate has to go through HR. If a candidate tracked me down and sent me a handwritten note I would probably tell Security to never let them back into the building!
There are many companies in the states.... :)

Maybe you want to thank Google for offering Gmail...from Gmail...to Gmail...
Any time you want to talk about cancer, you have to acknowledge the fact that it's actually over a hundred diseases. Cancer treatment is phenomenally effective for some cancers, for some classes of patients, and ineffective for others.

I can name eight people, off the top of my head, I've known who've had cancer. (I'm sure I could list more.) Three died, four are alive and well, and one was diagnosed last month. We're talking about a disease that would have killed all 8 a few decades ago.

Also, even if the improvements in cancer treatment are only interative (8 months instead of 3) that's still a major gain, from a research perspective. Look at HIV/AIDS; in 1985, it was an incurable and fatal disease. Due to a series iterative improvements, someone who contracts HIV today in the developed world will very likely be alive in 15 years, and by then, there may be a cure.
Whatever you use, have a template system to let your customers use their logos and company colors to brand their piece of the site.
A radically new type of engine
StockTwits brings tweets to the trading floor
I live in Canada, and have to laugh at free market fundamentalists who claim that single payer monopsonies encourage over-consumption. When it's pointed out that Canadians actually see doctors less frequently than Americans, they turn around and conclude that Canadians can't get access to doctors.
Just to play devil's advocate, here's a mind bender for you: we should be grateful to that asshole.

The insurance company is paying his salary because it costs them less than would the care that he manages to deny. If he didn't exist, the insurance company's costs would increase. This means that insurance premiums would have to increase. Whether you buy your insurance directly, or it's deducted from your paycheck, or your employer pays for it in full, that increased cost of insurance premiums would trickle down to you in the end.
I didn't say it couldn't work. I said that there are minimal (if any) benefits to a national health care system, as opposed to city, state or private systems. The economies of scale just aren't there.

As for overconsumption, the RAND experiment (as well as plenty of other statistical studies) shows that consumers will consume up to 40% more health care than they need if it is free (but not if they must pay out of pocket for it). Most likely your country either prevents this via other rationing mechanisms (which are politically infeasible in the US) or else you observed it but were unaware of it.
You can't protect people from themselves, that's the problem with those laws. Research shows this time and time again. Anti-gambling laws don't protect gamblers, they just move them from safe, legal, regulated casinos to scammy underground gaming halls and instant bingo ticket parlors. Anti-drug laws don't decrease drug use, they just increase violent crimes.

But that aside, thankfully capitalism doesn't require you to find a "nice" way of doing things. I'm as addicted to shaving as any player is to a Facebook game. (We could both stop, but don't want to.) I'm even more addicted to food. But that doesn't mean Gilette and Whole Foods are scammers.
Retail in 2015 - the commoditization of everything
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972346
It remains to be seen if the rest of the military industrial complex and its government tendrils will allow that.
I can't comment on "efficient" or "streamlined" but I would echo this recommendation to at least create a Google Webmaster Tools account before complaining to the Internet at large.
Also known as "Add your non-Gmail using friends to our direct marketing mailing list."
It's easier to change what the minority thinks it means than what the majority thinks it means.