skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
just use it for a week and you will see the benefit
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384)
Ask HN: I'm way too shy, please help
I'm genuinely shy.

I stopped playing the guitar because I was too shy to play in public. I couldn't even play for ONE other person. I wrote some songs and publicized them...in forums, to strangers, not to people I knew.

I quit blogging because I just wouldn't tell people that I had a blog. I think I'm kind of scared to expose my work or something.

Needless to say, if I had an app or even started a business, it'd be hell for me to advertise it. I really can't picture me trying to convince someone to use my product; if a cousin asked me what it does, I'd start to stutter.

This applies to live interactions, not stuff like email, forums or HN. I'd have no problem in showing you guys my work and asking for comments and reviews.

What can I do? I think starting a blog again and telling people about it would be a good way to start, because it'd expose my work without me feeling intimidated by the presence of someone else. Would you agree?
I think the Amish will suddenly start gaining a lot of new, adult members.

This bill is an abomination.
Assuming a 15% long term cap gains rate you'd write a check for $135k. You now have 765k--not bad, but how many years did it take? Now, what if the tax rate was 34% (as will be in a few years under this plan in CA): you write a check for $306k and you're left with 594k. If this exist took you three years you just averaged a 200k/year salary--great job. Unfortunately, you'd have been better off working for Cisco because of the amount of risk you likely took to achieve that outcome. Anything that the government does to minimize the reward for taking risk will, undoubtedly, also minimize the amount of innovation.

Please save this and come back and read it after you write a check (one or multiple) to the US government for millions of dollars after you struggle for 5+ years and literally risk everything you have to make a business successful.
Google disapproves.
My argument was not that raising the price will do nothing. "Even throttled by a higher patent fee" implies that the elevated costs would have a negative impact on patent volume. My point is that merely lowering the volume of submitted patents is insufficient to effect the necessary change, because the elements that cause the system to scale poorly are not purely volume based. And that's without even getting into the reality that dramatically higher patent submission costs would heavily advantage larger players at the expense of small innovators, which is likely to make the situation worse, not better given that it is the former who cause most o the problems with software patents at the present time.
I don't want to get into politics on either side, and there are several factors:

- The first is the "doc fix". Basically, there's a 21% automatic cut in the payments to doctors in Medicare. That would lower the payouts to the point where doctors would often lose money seeing a patient, and doctors would stop seeing Medicare patents. Like with the AMT, each year congress approves a temporary fix. It is likely that, while under CBO rules the score assumes there won't be more temporary fixes, there actually will be.

- There are several areas where the bill promises unspecified future cuts. The CBO numbers takes them at their word. Consensus is that these cuts won't actually happen.

- ~$53B comes from the fact that Social Security will take in more money because more companies will pay people wages so they can buy health care on their own instead of the company paying for it. However, it doesn't count the fact that SS will have to pay out correspondingly more.

- The CBO looks at a 10-year horizon. Most of the costs are scheduled not to start immediately, but to ramp way up later.

There are a bunch of other 'hacks' in the CBO scoring to keep the cost near the promised $900bn. Both sides do it, but they discovered a bunch of new tricks this time around. It means that, going forward, CBO numbers on large bills (from both sides!) are probably worse-than-meaningless.

On the older-to-younger q, it's mostly about how community-rating is implemented.
One thing that bothers me about taxes is that they are around 20-30% of profits. If you take on a business partner and give him/her 20%, you expect something in return.

What do we get for our taxes? Wars and social programs that will be bankrupt long before we can benefit from them. (roads, etc., are < 1%).

I would be OK with paying the taxes for social programs if I thought those programs would be sustainable into my old age, but they aren't and nobody seems to care, even though this is widely known.

So when you write the IRS a big check, you are paying for old people, and when you are old you will not receive the same treatment.

By the way, most of the cost of healthcare is in areas where the money has very little yield, such as end of life care for the elderly, bypass operations, stents, and statins. If people actually had the opportunity to consider the value of healthcare, reform would be nothing like what it is now.

Next time you see an old person eating bacon and eggs in a restaurant, picture that person's bypass operation, years of statins, and excessive end of life care that you are paying for... and think to yourself how perverse "reform" is.

Meanwhile, there are millions of so-called "illegal immigrants" who can't even call the police if they are assaulted or abused (for fear of deportation) being left out of the reform.

Most of your income taxes go to wars and medicare, and most of the healthcare reform goes to the practitioners who practice useless surgeries and interventions on a vulnerable population of elderly.

The "reform" bills don't change anything, they just transfer even more of the wealth of young people to the elderly and their exploiters.
We (DotSpots) are distributed and I'm up in Calgary, Alberta. Works well for the two of us up in Canada. It let me cofound the company and work for a while with no salary for some time without having to worry about my family's health.

Unfortunately it doesn't help much when hiring from the USA - the majority of our company is scattered around the states.

Is tarsnap Canadian-founded?
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.
Don't want this to come off rude, but here's my tip: Get outside.
> Better change that or you will not be doing well. That's the number one challenge you face I think.

This is a very serious problem indeed. Please read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209303
To understand how bad the situation is now, assume that in some major metro areas, private health insurance for a family of 4 with no known pre-existing conditions might not be available at any price.
The idea behind a big piece of the reform is to reward doctors who push preventative care over pills, surgeries, and continued treatment. Therefore (ideally) we will see less and less of these preventable surgeries since doctors and hospitals are striving to reduce their preventable and recurring care for patients (i.e., they get cash if they reduce it).
I can't imagine any shifting of costs from older to younger can be that big of a deal since we are already on the hook for everyone 65 and older, thanks to Medicare.
I had this idea about a year and a half ago, and I decided:

1 - To do this in Javascript would require a MASSIVE amount of code
2 - It required too much custom setup on the server, and
3 - It solved a problem that didn't exist.

I still think #3 is the most relevant, but #1 and #2 are still big impediments. From what I can see, this library doesn't address any of those concerns.

Perhaps it will do well, though. I can't wait to see. Good work and good luck!
1968 ASCII Animation from Russia
It's very relevant to HN. Sorry there's no code snippets in it for you...
No I wouldn't.

Question one, are you more attached to your self image as someone who has a real problem with shyness or are you more attached to the idea that you need to solve this problem for real ?

Are you serious about overcoming it ?

If you are, what you need to do is to take steps, possibly very small steps, every day, to push yourself past your comfort zone and be around other people and overcome your shyness.

There is no knowledge that will help you, you cannot read, think, research or write your way out of it, you can only practice and train your way out of it.

- Every day this week I will smile at a stranger. Then smile at two a day, then ten.
- Every day I will say 'hello' to people as I pass them and smile.
- When I deal with a cashier or serving person I will say "Thanks, you having a good day ?" I will practice small talk.

Action not thought will help you.
sscheper, you summed up my long post :)
My one-sentence view of what is going to happen in America is that "repudiation is coming" - on multiple levels, people, organizations, maybe even states will say "sorry, we can't fulfill obligation X any longer, we are done paying" .
well... 234 years was a good run.
Depending on your definition of "don't matter", that day is today:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0320/Health-care-...

When Obama signs the bill, anybody with a pre-existing condition will be able to a (temporary) national insurance plan for those with high-risk conditions. In 2014, it will become illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, and that plan will end.
There's no image search.
I do go outside. Parties, bars, the casual get-together. No problem meeting new people. Wanna go grab a beer? :-)
And for anyone who doesn't believe you, here's Newsweek's take on increasing the burden on the young:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/224020
My favorite proposed solution is "defined contribution instead of defined benefit", which would address most of the incentive problems and inequities you mention.

In Washington, they call it "privatizing" and run you out of town.
Hacker News isn't an index of important websites.
Breaking the time barrier - temporal software engineering
Anyone read this? what are your thoughts?
sure it will.. government jobs. IRS is planning on hiring 1000s
"1) Taking longer is not an indication of strength of the algorithm. Just like banging your head into a wall, multiple times isn't the best way to pass through it."

You do realize that this is how all modern "cryptographically secure" hash functions work, right? For that matter, so do the symmetric-key block ciphers that hashes are closely related to. All of them simply use S-boxes to obfuscate the numbers, followed by repeated "rounds" of simple bitwise primitives (bitshift, and, xor, perhaps addition modulo a power of 2). There's no inherent mathematical reason why combinations of these simple functions should be strong, when each function individually is weak.

This is precisely why cryptography is such a tricky field to work in.
Ugh, Ronnier, I fully agree with you, but you stated this in the wrong way given that the system has developed the way it has.

It is a bit shameful to be dependent on one's parents at 26, but because of employer based-benefits and the fact that is it NOT shameful to not yet be locked into a profession at 26 means that family insurance plans are a necessary reality.

The real question is why the system had never evolved to allow affordable family plans rather than employer based benefits. I have some thoughts, but that will make this an even more heated discussion.
I find myself very sympathetic to your view - especially the part about not wanting to pay for wars. I have also frequently heard people claim that entitlement programs to support the elderly are "unsustainable" - but I honestly don't understand what this means. Do you mean that the costs of providing for our elders would grow without bound? Also, if you know of a nice explanation that presents the evidence that entitlement programs like social security are doomed I would be very grateful if you could provide some links. I would really like to know.
Why should the average 20-30+ year old even carry insurance? The penalty is only $250 a year, rising to $750 in a few years. They can't deny you insurance based on pre-exiting issues. So why not just pay the penalty, which can be substantially less than the policy, until you have an issue?
If any such story ever belongs on HN, I think you can make a case that this story is it.
I also really like http://proglit.com/core-units/

More geared toward beginners, it covers basic programming concepts, C, Javascript, Java, Clojure, etc.
Ok, I did, left you a message there.
To argue is to present an argument. If you argue about something then your stance is unclear. However, if you argue a stance then you are arguing for that stance.

Example:

Tom argued about the war (unclear stance).

Tom argued the war was a bad thing (clear stance, Tom disliked war).

However, there may be a regional usage of 'argue' as 'question' or 'dispute' ("nobody could question/dispute the iphone's success") that I am unaware of.
Me too.. especially for a web developer (someone who's used to python, php, ruby, etc.. (scripted languages) moving to something like Java.

But.. ugh... XML is so gross. It would be nice to build something that abstracts a lot of the boilerplate crap you have to go through when doing Java.
hey ptn,

What are you afraid of that makes you so shy ?

People rejecting you or ridiculing you ?

Is there something in your past that made you decide to 'play it safe' ?

The instrument thing I can completely relate to, I used to play the saxophone (I managed to blow a small hole in one lung so not any more), and I really didn't dare to play it in front of others, I felt completely naked doing that.

And then one day a guy I knew in Amsterdam changed that, he played as well and said, come, the weather is good, let's go outside and play. He was way better than I was and there was no way I was going to be caught dead playing out in the street (Amsterdam, so you're pretty much assured an audience).

But he kept on needling me until I gave in, one song only. So we went out and played that one song. One song became 10 and before long I really enjoyed it, even if I never played outside again I did lose my shyness about that.

With people in conversation it is a different thing, writing is a lot easier than speaking because when you write you can re-read your words before you click that 'submit' or 'reply' button and that gives you some time to get your thoughts in proper order.

People that are good at 'thinking on their feet' usually have less of a problem with interacting with others than those that need to think for a bit.

I really suggest you read darkxanthos' blog posts about all this, he has a way with words that I can't hope to match and his experiences are chronicled in a way that you actually get something from it that you can use.

There is this song called 'sunscreen', one line in it stands out for me: Do something that scares you every day.

best of luck!

Jacques
In one set of circumstances, a family that could not obtain coverage now can, and contributes premium payments every months to compensate for that coverage.

In the other set of circumstances, the family can't obtain coverage. Something bad happens. Now, instead of having insurance cover it, they go bankrupt. We are all still paying the bills. The only difference that I can see is that in this set of circumstances, the family (a) didn't pay insurance premiums, and (b) was driven into bankruptcy.

What's the win you see in the second scenario?
You say that as if most stock market transactions have anything to do with the actual company and not just the stock itself.
http://dpaste.de is a much nicer alternative pastebin, which spawned from this one.

Also, it's worthy to note that both were originally built for the Django community. I too wonder why this was posted (and why it's on the homepage, heh.. it's really not much different than other pastebins.
But, not Hacker News, so I'm flagging.
I wish they (President and Congress) closed Iraq's financial black hole first and only then entered new spending spree.
That's what Obama promised during his presidential campaign. Sigh.
Startup Lessons from Marine Officer Training School
This sort of economic handwaving makes a lot of assumptions. Silicon Valley isn't in Europe for a lot of reasons, American engineers being the driving force behind it notwithstanding. We have such a strong small business unit because (a) a lot of our economy has always been driven by small business (that "American ingenuity" people always talk about and (b) U.S. laws are very friendly to the small business.

And since when does our government really get involved with "financing private ventures"? Banks aren't paying out for insurance (and will probably pay slightly less under this reform), and most VC's will have to pay about 2% more in tax. So maybe 5-10 useless web startups a year won't happen, but I don't think it's going to slow down small businesses at all. Many of the people I know who would start one or join an existing one can't because of health insurance.
Two questions:

Are you an employee, investor, or other interested party?

Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words?
Http://www.tube8.com/amateur/students-in-the-room-hidden-camera/232981/
IPad + MidiPad == multi-touch MIDI controller
You could if those changes were replicated in both the colour A test and the colour B test?
I use DDG along with googlesharing (http://www.googlesharing.net) for when I need to use google.

This submission might end up dead, but at least it'll introduce this great search engine to some new users.
It's a very good question.

Of course, if the healthy behave that way, it drives up the premiums for everyone else.
You guys r idiots. This article rulez!!!1
I got 3 wrong - I'm ashamed <g>
I agree with the author's distaste with Apple's pulling of the game. But that's about the only part of the article that I don't find inane.

* "If I'm a scammer for charging $399.99 for a stupid app, Apple is a scammer for charging a starting price of $500 for a sub par netbook" is just bad, empty logic. Ranting about the iPad at all is a pointless tangent.

* "A PHONE IS NOT A GENERIC GAMING PLATFORM. IT WORKS FOR SOME GAMES, BUT NOT EVERYTHING. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING HAS THE ABILITY TO RUN GAMES THAT DOESN'T MEAN EVERY GAME SHOULD BE MADE FOR IT." Thank you, sir, but I and other gamers will decide what we think are gaming platforms, no matter how many capital letters you throw at us. Hint: PCs were supposed to be business machines.

It's an unfocused, juvenile hissy fit, which is too bad because it started with a valid grievance.
Just use it for a week, and you'll see. For many things, the results are better than Google. (And it's not just the results, but the way they're presented.)
Tarsnap is my (sole-founder) startup, based on Vancouver.
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.
No, it's about the number of transitors on an integrated circuit and the resulting computational power.
Or, less extreme, changing the terms of the promise after the promise is made. Very few pension funds are so comprehensively mismanaged that they will not be able to pay any pensions, but very few are so competently managed that they will be able to pay all promised pensions, so look for them to do things like means testing to get out of their obligations. ("You spent the last forty years saving money by yourself!? Pfft, what do you need a pension for. Amscray, we've got people who actually need the money to look out for.")

This is inevitable for social security, and I'm thinking the gold-plated public pensions (and many private ones) will follow suit.
234 was a good run ... of not being a country civilized enough to look after it all it's sick
That's debatable. Is it the tax (as a proportion of GDP), OH&S regulations, other work regulations (i.e. ease of hiring and firing), immigration policy, education system, red-tape for businesses, pump-priming (from lucrative defense contracts), resources (good soil, some oil, lots of mines), federal-state-local structure, the number of states (which means other states can cherry-pick regulations that work from their neighbors), or what?

As I see it, the US spends a fortune on health, and gets a dodgy system. It's not quite the caricature Michael Moore paints, but he doesn't seem too far from the mark. Whether that is funded by companies (health benefits for employees - more red tape than in countries with universal health) or by individuals (which lowers individual risk tolerance) is immaterial. Public health works better than private health, according to all the numbers I've seen.
How does equity figure into the equation? I'm guessing even equity doesn't matter much for startups, since they'll have very low valuation to begin with anyways.
Our pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great because the human mind is amazing.

At least that's how I see it ;)
It would be great if Duck Duck Go could use Google's index rather than Yahoo's
I like driving too, but don't focus too narrowly on roads. I think you're getting benefit from more than < 1% of taxation. Public education helps everyone. Research helps everyone. Having a criminal justice system helps everyone (well, the non-violent drug offenders would disagree). Having a strong civil legal system helps everyone. Meat inspectors help everyone. Financial regulators help everyone.

You could even say that knowing that we don't have senior citizens starving and dying in the streets as helping everyone. I like knowing that I live in a society that takes care of many of the less fortunate.

I'm not saying that government is good at solving every problem, but focusing on just roads, wars, and old people is very narrow.
You are not alone, I'm the same boat here. The thing is the experience is something that you don't get until just after of needing it.
Case in point: "But even if the decision does leave some Arizona children without health-care coverage, Orient said, there is no alternative in the state's current financial situation. 'At a certain point, it doesn't matter how good you think a program is,' she said. 'If you can't pay for it, what are you going to do?'"

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/...
Ask HN: What do you listen to when you code?
I find that different people use widely different music styles to help get into their coding flow.

What do you typically use when you are starting a coding session?

For myself I prefer Metal/Rock from bands like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciple_(band)
Your thinking on this matter are an abomination