Xichekolas

That graph amuses me. Notice the benefit to users continues to climb, even if the benefit to "facebook and other companies" happens to climb faster. So even though it benefits you more and more, you will deny yourself that benefit because it happens to help facebook too?

Of course, it's just a made-up graph, and his very first sentence implies the line is really trending downward in his opinion, but I'm always intrigued when an instance of the Ultimatum Game happens in real life:

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

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, "Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results."

Ironic that a so-called "expert in stereotyping" attributes successful research to "genius". Doubly so considering the content of the rest of the article.

> ... because they believe there is an advantage in doing so

That is one possible explanation, but I think it is really simpler than that: People like to talk about themselves, and they like to find out what other people are doing and talk about that too.

He was picking an earnings number ($1 billion-ish) and a P/E ratio (20ish) and solving for the P.

Of course, the $1 billion is revenue, not earnings, so that number is likely to be lower (or negative) and the ratio is likely (if history is any guide) to be higher due to that, so this kind of calculation is pretty pie-in-the-sky.

No. I'd tell him to get a Facebook/Picasa/Flickr/Twitpic account.

Dad used to get a shared hosting account for things like that, but now we have services that host content for free. They are much easier for Dad to use as well.

In this age of $20/mo VPSs and free content hosting, I'm honestly not sure how shared hosting survives. It's not as flexible as a VPS for hosting sites (and with more than two sites, isn't even as cheap), and it's not as easy to use (or as free) as Facebook.

Specifically, the list including all your friends, and none of your other 'connections':

http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp

I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and don't feel bad about it at all.

Maybe we have different definitions of 'personal'. I was talking about posting things about your relationship status or medical conditions... the only people I would tell that stuff to anyway are the "lucky 35". I'm not saying avoid social networking all together. Facebook is, like you said, great for keeping up with acquaintances. But you don't share personal stuff with acquaintances anyway.

> But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life

I see my "lucky 35" in real life quite often, and can tell them personal things in person, where it becomes a conversation. I'm not sure why I would ever need to share personal things online.

After all, the reason people become "online friends" to begin with is that you don't see that person enough in real life to maintain a friendship. If you really need to tell one of these pseudo-friends (or far-away family) something personal, there are many avenues for that, including email and the phone.

I really don't get this argument. It seems that his point is that section 3.3.1 is going to scare developers away and ruin the platform.

Ok. So let the developers go elsewhere.

The only party hurt here is Apple. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, then let them do so. It's one thing to have an intervention for a friend that is an addict, quite another to save a company from itself.

As a friend put it, section 3.3.1 pisses off an extremely small subset of iPhone users... namely, the developers themselves. No one else cares. If they app ecosystem dies because of it, then people will jump to another smartphone. But until that actually happens (if ever), Apple can get away with whatever it wants, and trying to argue about it is not going to get you anywhere.

:%s/Emacs/Vim/g

Although I'd also point out that even if it did run Emacs, I'm not sure how fun it would be to use Emacs' key combos with a software keyboard.

The company that comes up with a way to have the screen close to my face and the keyboard in my lap will win my vote. That is one reason that, while I use my netbook for hours on end to surf and read, I rarely use it for coding/writing. I like the freedom of having my (obnoxiously clicky) keyboard and screen in different physical locations.

Filter has been done by many a GM script.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

I realize that only helps if you have a browser with GM (like Firefox).

To go meta on this meta, I think the requirement to downvote is still something like 200 to 250 karma. With a couple good submissions or comments, you could have that in a matter of days.

The community has grown, and these restrictions aren't "indexed to inflation" so to speak, so the bar is lower all the time. Also, while I personally agree that downvotes should only be used for trollish things (or really just done away with in favor of flagging), that has never been universally agreed upon (and I have seen this topic come up a lot).

You just need to lay a few down the west side and wait for radioactive winds to take care of everyone else, but yeah, you have a point. I think most people vastly overestimate the blast radius of nuclear weapons.

A 1 megaton nuclear bomb detonated near the surface has a blast radius of about 1.7 miles. Pretty much nothing is left within this circle. Meaningful lethal damage only continues out to about 2.7 miles.

A 1.7 mile radius translates to roughly 9 mi^2. A 2.7 mile radius is roughly 23 mi^2. To carpet bomb New Hampshire, you'd need a lot of nukes. About 988 of them in fact.

Now 25 megatons is more interesting... you'd need about 68 of those to ensure <2% survival rate, or 25 of them if you are satisfied with <50% survival rate.

Of course, with good placement and strong winds, you could effectively kill 99% with only about 12-15 one megaton bombs. All that radioactive dust from the mushroom cloud comes down somewhere, and with a 15mph wind, that means a lethal dose within 90 miles of ground zero,

Source: http://www.nationalterroralert.com/nuclear/

Can you put the theme permalink in the generated theme files as a comment? Seems like it might be handy to have someday.

I agree with all your explicit points, and I realize that graph is a very crude indicator.

Also, I agree with the implicit point I think you are making, which is that this reform really does nothing to address these issues. (Although I would also say that I'm fine paying for the drug development. We shouldn't stop doing something that benefits us just because others can take advantage.)

So yeah, I really don't have a rebuttal because I agree with you. I wanted much more out of reform, but at this point I'm happy with anything that might get us a bit closer, especially if it makes it easier to reform in the future (which may be wishful thinking).

> Given that our understanding has limits, this is far from certain.

That is a pretty big assumption to make. If you are saying that our understanding is limited at this point in time, then I'd agree. Barring loss of data/memory, our understanding will always be limited now compared to our understanding in the future.

But if you are claiming there is some fundamental upper bound to our understanding, and that a complete functional understanding of the human body is beyond that upper bound, then I have to ask what motivates that claim.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that kind of thinking is what supports flawed pseudoscience like "intelligent design" (not claiming you support that, and really not trying to open that can of worms; just drawing a parallel). Sure, if you assume that our understanding is already at some kind of limit, and then show something we can't explain, it follows naturally that it must have supernatural origins. If, on the other hand, you realize that our inability to explain something is most likely just a function of time (eventually we'll learn enough that we will be able to explain it), then the argument seems absurd.

I'm sure the house leadership had the plan worked out pretty quickly, it just takes time to work out the details with the Senate leadership, then communicate it to the >250 democrats in the House and line up the required number of votes.

Was the plan hard to figure out for the media and other commentators? Probably, because they don't have access to the House rules people, nor do they think about procedural maneuvers all day.

In retrospect, passing two bills was a very elegant solution. By passing the Senate version straight up, they guarantee that at least some version of victory is achieved without having to deal with the 59 seat issue. Then sending an amendment package back to the Senate with only carefully chosen amendments that allow the reconciliation maneuver gives it a decent shot despite the loss of the supermajority. Had they tried to pass one bill that combined the original and the amendments, the filibuster could have killed it.

You just have to understand, for those of us that have been here for three years, this kind of thing gets old. It happens every month or so, and it's always the same plea.

You know, HN has changed... but everything changes as it grows. The original sense of tight community is hard to maintain with so many users, but c'est la vie.

And the submissions go in waves. I pretty much stopped coming here for two months because I got tired of a certain type of submission that seemed to be trending... but I came back one day and found we were in a technical submission era again, which, along with the insightful discussion, is the reason I come to begin with.

So really, it's better to demonstrate the standards through your contributions than spend timing talking about the standards. The welcome guide and FAQ talk about them plenty, and the point of the karma/flagging system is to allow the existing community to enforce those norms and traditions.

They can be flagged (and are, at least by me), which is better, because then they get killed.

According to CNN, Obama is going to sign the bill on Tuesday. The amendments are a totally separate bill, which will now be punted back and forth between the House and Senate, assuming the Senate doesn't just pass it as it stands.

Source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/22/obama-to-sig...

My understanding is that they passed two things last night.

First was the Senate version of the bill, so that is basically the baseline now.

Second was an amendments package that "fixes" some parts of the bill. This package is what is going to the Senate for "reconciliation". The reconciliation process allows these amendments to be passed by a simple majority, provided there are no amendments added by the Senate (there is a risk the Republicans will try to add some). If the Senate passes the amendments as they stand, then they would also become law. If the Senate passes them with changes, then they would go back to the House for another vote.

Either way though, the reform voted on in the first part (the existing Senate version) is law.

My original source was an Economist article about health care from last summer, but it seems to be behind a paywall now.

The Washington Post covers it here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/05/health_r...

I wish I would have had this link earlier. This is probably the best explanation of what the reform actually does that I have ever seen.

ihodes and callmeed: done!

> Why did it "blossom"?

Because health care costs skyrocketed, which led to skyrocketing insurance premiums. Something that was previously 1-2% of compensation is now often >10%.

> Why did it not get corrected after WW2?

It's a rare thing for Congress to pass a bill that reduces complexity... just look at the tax system.

This bill is a case in point. There were numerous way to reduce complexity (and hence costs), but instead they just added more. More complexity isn't always bad, but it's very rarely cheaper.

Ways to reduce complexity: remove the market distorting tax break, regulate insurance at a national instead of state-by-state level, make insurance compulsory, make health insurance actually act like other insurance. (You don't expect your car insurance to pay for oil changes or your homeowner's insurance to pay for smoke detector batteries do you? And in that vein, when was the last time you lost your car insurance because you lost your job?)

> As I see it, the US spends a fortune on health, and gets a dodgy system.

Too true. One of my favorite infographics regarding health care: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovatio...

We see doctors less, spend more than twice the average anyway, and have below average life expectancy.

The reason is the $265 billion tax break given to employers for providing health insurance.

During WW2, there were wage controls, but employers needed to attract workers, so Congress gave them this small (at the time) tax break for providing health insurance to workers. (They don't have to pay payroll taxes on that portion of compensation.) Who doesn't want to encourage employers to provide perks to their employees, especially perks that improve their health?

But this has blossomed into a huge market imbalance, where people can't change jobs due to insurance concerns, and buying individual insurance puts you at a huge financial disadvantage compared to employer-provided insurance.

The entitlement unsustainability is entirely a problem of demographics. People are living longer and having fewer children, so the ratio of young working people (who pay) to old retired people (who benefit) is diminishing.

The classic answers are to either increase FICA taxes or cut benefit levels... which seems idiotic, when the obvious solution (to me) is to just raise the eligibility age. Part of the problem is that people are living longer, and are mostly healthy and able to work longer, so raise the retirement age.

Just curious, but understand if you don't want to share, is your "pre-existing condition" diabetes?

I know two people with Type 1 Diabetes that are basically stuck in their jobs due to their insurance situation. One has a PhD and works in a University lab, which he enjoys, except he had to turn down the opportunity to join a startup because it would've been financially impossible for him.

And you should be proud of that.

I'm currently a CS grad student, with zero debt, working as a GTA/GRA (depending on the semester). I get my insurance through the University for an awesome $94 a semester, but if I were still young enough, I'd definitely opt for my parents insurance, and I wouldn't be ashamed of it. It would just make financial sense.