karzeem

It stops recording when the phone is locked. But I'd imagine that as long as it's recording, the phone wouldn't go into lock mode unless you specifically told it to. The good news is that even if someone takes your phone and deletes the video, you can email Qik to recover whatever portion of the video was uploaded to their servers before the deletion.

I think I missed the part of the article where they discussed a good reason not to privatize Amtrak. If government subsidy made it better than private sector alternatives, that would be something. But the argument here is what, that we should preserve a system that even with heavy subsidies can't manage to do better than the variety of profitable alternatives? Who does that help? It sounds like a decisive lose-lose.

The only argument in favor of preserving the status quo is to protect the jobs of Amtrak workers. But if that's the concern, it would actually be cheaper to let the market lay some of them off and just cut a giant, multi-year severance check to each of the affected workers.

From an economic perspective, open borders are highly desirable. But you're right that they're not really compatible with welfare programs. I don't know if it's ever been tried, but one solution would be an "open borders, but non-citizens aren't eligible for welfare until they've been here for, asy, 10 years" policy.

Surprising downvotes. I wouldn't have thought that the HN hivemind feels that something illegal is ipso facto immoral.

I don't know enough to have an opinion about whether it's illegal, but even assuming it is, that doesn't mean it's immoral.

At the risk of revealing some intrinsic immorality or something, I don't really see what's wrong with this. It would be wrong of the sales team to claim to have used Airbnb for stays that never happened, or to invent false testimonials, but that's not the charge.

The allegation is that they emailed property owners and said, effectively, "Airbnb is great, you should use it" without saying how or why they came to hold that opinion. It's untruthful in the sense of not including the whole truth, but I'd put it decisively under naughty, not blackhat.

Yes, and they're lobbying state governments to be allowed to do more.

The government does regulate the safety of things like propane tanks, but major retailers, Home Depot included, usually have merchandise quality standards well above what the government mandates. That's suggestive (though not conclusive, I'll admit) that it's Home Depot, and not government safety standards, that keep you safe when you shop at Home Depot.

He argues that private certification organizations (think Consumer Reports, but for doctors) are a more reliable and versatile way to see how competent a doctor is, and also that hospitals and clinics have an incentive to only hire competent people.

The rebuttal would be "Fine, but certainly state licensure can't hurt. It's just a backup." He says that it does in fact hurt, by allowing the AMA to control the supply of people who get to practice medicine. This limits patients' options w/r/t how, from whom, and for what price they can get medical care.

E.g. suppose I find a competent, well-trained nurse to remove a mole for me. The nurse and I agree to go ahead for $100. Friedman says that it's a) morally wrong and b) inefficient for the government to barge in and say, "No, for your own safety, you're not allowed to make this voluntary agreement. You have to have a doctor do this. Oh, and it'll cost $300." That's the effect of a law that says only licensed physicians are allowed to remove moles.

And you're absolutely right to be risk averse. That's why if you needed major surgery, you'd go to a reputable hospital and not to some clinic above a grocery store.

The hospital in this case is a middle man, and their role is vouching for the doctors they hire. When you buy a propane tank at Home Depot, the reason it doesn't blow up is that Home Depot's reputation depends on selling non-explodey propane tanks. When you buy meat at Whole Foods, why are you sure it's not rotten? Because the government checked that specific steak, or because you know Whole Foods wouldn't sell you rotten meat? Similarly, the reason people go to reputable hospitals is precisely because they know they can trust those places to hire competent staff.

There are a couple encouraging signs in medicine. First, a lot of doctors advertise that they're board-certified. That's a voluntary, private certification that attests to the doctor's competence and has more rigorous requirements than state licenses do. Without licensure, there's every reason to think that private certifications would take on even more importance.

Second, the market is steadily routing around physician's monopoly on the practice of medicine. There's sverything from questionable stuff like acupuncture and chiropractic to nurses and PAs doing things that only doctors used to be allowed to do (e.g. prescriptions, minor procedures), and those trends seem to be accelerating.

> "Some occupations clearly need to be licensed. Nobody wants to unleash amateur doctors and dentists on the public."

Actually, Milton Friedman famously (and impressively persuasively) did oppose mandatory licensure of doctors.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0194e.asp

A lot of the trouble with licensure is that it tends to ratchet upwards. If I'd been forced to spend $20,000 getting licensed as a barber, I'd be mad if a competitor opened across the street without having spent all that money. Repealing licensure requirements benefits everybody except the people who've already gotten licenses.

Anything that makes it easier for people to buy their own health insurance is a good thing. There's something about employers buying products for employees that makes those products tend towards crappiness (cf. enterprise software).

The YC data point probably has a sample bias. I'd expect that young people apply in disproportionately large numbers.

I spent a couple years of my errant youth in the entertainment industry, where unpaid internships are the standard way to enter the business. But those jobs aren't worth anything like a minimum wage to the employers, so if they weren't unpaid, the jobs simply wouldn't exist. For people looking to get a job in the industry after graduation, their best shot is to get an internship in college, do a great job and meet lots of people, and parlay that into an offer. Those "vulnerable" young people should be the first to object to a crackdown on unpaid internships.

You're of course right. I'm questioning whether it's a wise price to pay. A lot of funds' results take a big hit once you account for fees.

> AR Magazine said Mr. Shaw, who gave up day-to-day oversight of [D.E. Shaw's funds] in 2002, made the list because the firm charged a 3 percent management fee and took 30 percent of the investment gains.

What's the justification for management fees at all, let alone such a steep one? Their cut of the profit in fat years should be enough to keep the doors open in lean ones. Such fees also create a perverse incentive to simply get as much money under management as possible.

I'm a little embarrassed that it took me until the paragraph about uniforms to realize what was going on.

One solution: they record your location data but will delete it on (your) demand.

1Password was a godsend for this problem.

On education in particular, school choice is common in much of western Europe, and that seems to go some way towards mitigating the effects of government involvement.

It's sad how common these feelings are and how nearly all of them trace back to the government's (arguably) well-intentioned insistence on running schools itself.

Milton Friedman's idea for alleviating poverty was a variation of this idea. It's called the negative income tax and the basic idea is that people below a certain threshold get cash from the government each year. The further below the threshold you are, the more cash you get.

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

I know it's called profit, but the money they keep goes back into the business. The ways for it to be profit in the sense of making the shareholders rich(er) are by increasing the value of the stock or by going to shareholders as a dividend. And both of those avenues are taxed.

Even when a company pays little to no tax, the government does get itself a pretty good taste of the profits via the dividend tax.

Why do people get fat?

I think it's more that when faced with a) a site where the stuff you want is surrounded by other things to wade through, and b) a site that contains only things you want, people prefer the latter.

Surprising that it's taken them this long to leave. What company enjoys being listed alongside vastly superior and less expensive competitors?

I was a freshman at Columbia at the time. CUcommunity's interface was MySpace-esque. The first version of Facebook was very spartan. No photos other than your profile pic, no wall, no messages. Basically nothing other than your info page. The upshot was that you used all of Facebook's features and a (small) subset of CUcommunity's.

Facebook was several months ahead on spreading to other schools, and that was huge. Probably the decisive factor. By the time CUcommunity spread (rechristened as CampusNetwork), I think Wayne is right that it was simply way too late. By the beginning of summer 2004, Facebook's position on college campuses was pretty obviously unassailable.

Edit: found some screenshots of CUcommunity/CampusNetwork: http://www.wikicu.com/CampusNetwork

The point is that tablets are themselves making the market a lot bigger than it is now and that the iPad will get a disproportionately big chunk of the new pieces of pie.