skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A stable mixed republic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_government), with separate institutions organized on democratic, aristocratic, and monarchial principles, organized into a common state, has tended to be more stable than a state based on one of those bases alone. The Roman republic and early modern England are good examples of this.

I think democracy is necessary - but not sufficient - to maintain stability in the state and moderation in the laws. The cultural problem we face today is that the popular perception of democracy has shifted from seeing it as a mechanism by which the public can protect itself against the abuse of power to seeing it as a legitimizing factor for the assertion of power; institutions are criticized for being "undemocratic" on the latter basis, targeted for reform, and the end result is that our laws become increasingly unbalanced and excessive.
Visit your local doctor this afternoon and you can enjoy the site tonight!
Lovely clean design. Two things:

1. What do the different colors of the strains mean? It's kind of confusing. From the URLs I'm guessing that the colors correspond to Cannabis sativa, C. indica, and hybrid strains -- it would be helpful to see some explanation of this.

2. On the pages for individual strains, there are lists of descriptors (e.g. a strain might make people feel "Energetic"). These should be clickable, if someone wants to see what other strains are most strongly associated with those descriptors. You already have something like this on your Explore page, so the plumbing for this shouldn't be too terribly hard. You could probably just link to your Explore page with the appropriate URL parameters.

Congratulations on launching, by the way.
Ask HN: Best Android dev books or tutorials?
I'm about to embark on developing an Android application. Are there any books or tutorials that come highly recommended? Preferably something assuming you already know Java and just focusing on Android specific topics.
Best. Site. Ever.

Love the design, love the functionality.

Brilliant.
There are hundreds of recent failures in start-ups, I think there is no much to learn from the 10 recent failures in the post. I would be better to know examples of those that are going to succeed.
Is the server down? I cannot see any arrow even when I open multiple windows (Chrome 5).
Re: "The technically superior solutions often get overlooked for the most accessible ones."

Are there any server-side Javascript environments being overlooked? And would it be fair to say that these are technically superior to V8 + Node?
Pleasing, private posterous?
Thank you!

We don't have export yet, but we've definitely wanted to share some of our entries with close friends and family too. We'll be brainstorming around this!

Regarding past history: For your first week, we just send you your entry from the previous day. After you've been using it for a week though, and some history has built up, we'll show you entries from a week ago (and then a month ago, etc.).

Thanks for checking it out - really appreciate it!
I upvoted you but I disagree completely.

Names are of vital importance.

Meebo may sound idiotic to you but it's rhythm and sound fit the web-2.0 ethos, it's short, easy to spell, easy to share, lends itself to verb-ising, including "me" suggests personal communication and "-bo" links with other site name (I've never heard of it, but I'm guessing it's a myspace/bebo mix based on the name) ...
I don't really have a bad list. I first look for flights on Frontier then SW and Jetblue. If none of those work out I default to Delta for the skymiles and most of their planes have in flight internet from what I have seen.

What always gets me is that long haul flights seem to have less room than domestic flights or the regionals. The most uncomfortable flight I've ever had was from ATL -> Tokyo because the seats were so close together. I ended up spending hours just sitting in the galley with the flight attendants.
What’s for Sale on the Bug Market?
what salary does 5000 euro a month loaded costs represent?
Does this open up 3rd party support of jail-broken phones as a legitimate business?
I e-mailed the author months ago about a bug where the glibc command-line version would stay alive and peg to 100% CPU usage after logout. It seems to have never been fixed.

Any chance you could ping him about that?
Apple has proven willing to brick jailbroken phones in the past. They didn't suffer any liability, and didn't get very much negative publicity. And it did wonders for maintaining the wall around the walled garden they are trying to create with the app store.

Given this, I see nothing to suggest that they won't do it again. And any company who suggests otherwise is taking a definite risk.
Interview with Science Fiction Writer Ted Chiang
That's a very difficult feature to implement, since the encryption has to be 2 way. It's much easier to achieve this with passwords, because all the system needs to do is validate supplied passwords (as opposed to reproducing the passwords themselves).
Very cool. I will definitely use this as soon as you have encryption and a privacy policy.
> Why not

Ugliness.
F5 Week in Review, July 19th – 23rd, 2010
Unfortunately it doesn't support controlling the player from JS, yet.
How to view yourself
It does say on the home page that "Only you can see your entries." If they are not currently encrypted, that would seem to be untrue.
Love the design. I just signed up. Can't wait to see how well it'll help me keep a journal.

One thing I noticed: on the login page can you make pressing tab in the login box go directly to the password input box?
I think there should be a curious group of people with negative karma, we could enjoy a lot with our comments and posts, I find positive karma and smiling faces a little boring. Cheers.
I like it. Many times I've wanted to start a journal, just to record memories, but I detest writing. This makes it feel easy. We'll see how it goes.
cheese.ly
This is the coolest point to me:

"GridCentric enables on-demand scale by distributing virtual machine state to hundreds of processors in seconds."

Or more specifically, the concept of being able to "fork a VM into hundreds of instances in seconds."

That's what I'd want to see as a big tagline somewhere. Also I'd want to see a few concrete scenarios where this is super useful.
You can't post a site on HN if it doesn't have an api!

Is this your personal point of view, or an actual guideline for the site? If the latter, it's news to me, so thanks for citing it.
PHP vs Python (not a flame war, just a logical comparison of features)
After my first job search, I noticed in Canada entry level positions are between 60 - 65 a year.
Right now I'm getting the error "Error establishing database connection" are they being overloaded?
Comparing Node.js to Ruby on Rails is as useful as comparing apples to oranges. Node.js is not a web framework. Node.js has a wonderful paradigm for evented programming, but that does not mean you can not also have evented programming with Ruby or Rails. Take a look at http://github.com/igrigorik/async-rails or things related to http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine
Still plenty of government regulation involved...everything from FCC emissions to controls on the types of materials that can be used to build them.
Yes, you can escape -- if this is truly a concern for you (not saying it should be) consider gearing your investments to hedge against inflation.

It's reasonably safe to assume that the government would not confiscate ALL your belongings at once to pay off the debt. The more likely scenario is for highly indebted governments to pay off their debts through inflation and a devalued currency.
Just another illustration of how vastly different flying experiences can be on the exact same airline.

If you're not already aware, seats that have their backs to an exit row never recline. So, your best bet (until an airline offers you your wish) would be either an exit-row seat or a bulkhead seat.
I guess that is why thousands of startups are running out of run-down brick warehouses covered in a swipe of fresh paint in some of the most seismically unstable areas of San Francisco; because people care that their companies are skimping on rent.
Yes you are. The first thing you are missing that such behaviors are configurable: you can choose whether to fail silently or get an error.
The second thing you are missing is the reason such behavior exist in the first place — namely, there are usage scenarios when it is preferable. Having ability to choose which trade-offs to have is in no way technical inferiority.
Dan Simmons, "The Fifth Heart" (A new existentialist Sherlock Holmes adventure)
Just personal.
FYI:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
That's usually the case for DDonuts and Subways but Indians who create high tech startups are usually the ones who stood in line for a greencard ( sometimes for decades ).
Ask HN: Payments/Subscriptions Based Startups and Niches
I'm doing some research for an article and would like your help:

What startups and niches use payments or subscriptions as their primary revenue model?

The immediate one that comes to mind is groupon, but there are plenty of others. Like dating sites for example. Even 'service' sites like pandora.com fall under this.

What startups, niches or ideas can you think of that follow this revenue model? Please list as many as you can.

P.S. Lets leave out those that sell and ship physical products.
There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple.

Having said that, I'm of the opinion that most polls are useless, even more so if they're done by an analyst firm like Forrester.

EDIT: On a side note, I wonder how many of the Facebookers lied about owning an iPad.
Scott Adams' Model of Personal Interaction
A random sample of 20,000 is massive. A non-random sample of even a million can easily be worthless.

Political polls are very careful about getting a sample representative of the country which is why they can have some value. They also have very detailed models, which a lot of thought have gone into, about what the general population looks like and how to get accurate results. The weighting from this facebook poll is not based a bunch of well-developed knowledge but just guesses at what to do.
Since Earth is not borrowing money from Mars, does the debt explosion really matter, or is it just an accounting device?

To me, this has always been the most crucial question to any discussino of "debt," but I don't believe the article actually answered it[1].

Perhaps more to the point, I don't believe I've encountered a concise explanation as to how debt, particularly sovereign debt, affects the real[2] worldwide economy.

Would a country go to war over a sovereign default?

[1] The section heading is "Why It Matters," so it's not really hiding that it's begging the question.

[2] i.e. human behavior as it applies to production and trade
Ask HN: Rate my startup
I have been extremely annoyed about the lack of automation when it comes to small businesses (especially my dentist and accountant). They complained about not having a dedicated secretary (only part time) and as a 9-5er it was hard for me to set aside time to get an appointment from them during the day (secretaries were only there for the first part of the day).

So I had been toying around with the idea of creating a web based appointment scheduling system specifically designed for small businesses.

I just launched the public beta a week ago. This is the beginning of the road for me. It is a one man operation and I know I am missing a lot (features/eye candy) that's why I would love to get your feedback.

I know there are competitors but I believe they target a different segment of the market based on the features they emphasize and their pricing. I think the market is large enough to segment. I want to later expand this offering to cover most of the shared services that these small organizations need.

What do you think?

The url is: www.smartpointment.com
Clojure Implementation of Dictionary Trie
Use Step, man: http://github.com/creationix/step
Ask HN: Payment processing in New Zealand
Hi all. I'm a small startup based in New Zealand. My product needs to have recurring billing and I was hoping to use a payment service like Chargify so that I don't have to deal with any credit card details and not have to worry about PCI compliance.
Turns out Chargify has no support for any kind of sales tax (in New Zealand we have to add GST to sales to New Zealand based customers). Braintree doesn't do international customers (at least on my scale), so it looks like I'm back to trying to integrate ActiveMerchant and having to handle all this stuff in my code - exposing myself to more risk, since I am just a one man band at this stage.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this? Perhaps I just open a paypal account and do it that way?
I didn't get that email! But I'll look into it right now.
I would like to see a pacman in svg for comparison purposes.
"With coroutines you have to worry about IO all over the place and have to make your functions coroutine safe and Ryan Dahl,"

No, no, a thousand times no. Node.js partisans really need to start actually using Erlang or Haskell for a little while before spouting this canned line off. You do not have to jump through enormous hoops to deal with IO in Haskell or Erlang, it just works.

Callbacks are behind the state of the art. Coroutines or generators or any other cooperative-multitasking primitives in languages that didn't support them from day one and have enormous sets of libraries not "cooperative-aware" are behind the state of the art, too.

This is all just "cooperative multithreading" again and I am yet to see anyone explain why this time is going to turn out any different than last time we tried cooperative multithreading.
I've heard this before. "Oh, callbacks are fine for little things like this hello world demo, but for Big Programs, you need (threads/coroutines/etc.) because they're Serious Business."

That might be true. Maybe for Big Programs, something else is better. But I think the problem is that setting out to build a Big Program for Serious Business is Doing It Wrong.

The best frameworks (or, at least, my favorite frameworks) are collections of small tools with consistent interfaces and interchangeable parts.

If you can manage callbacks for a 100-200 LOC program, then you can build a Big Program out of such modules with a little bit of forethought. Instead of setting out to write a Big Program, why not try to figure out how to express your Big Problem in terms of a bunch of Little Problems, and then come up with a way to have Little Programs assemble.

Then, assemble the Little Programs to solve the Little Problems. There is no solveable Big Problem which cannot be broken down into some finite set of Little Problems.

Callbacks make it natural to solve problems in this manner.

I actively develop a several thousand line NodeJS project. It's quite nice, actually.
I think you're unnecessarily trivializing things that you personally care less about. Who cares about embedded environments? People who work in them. Is that group dwarfed by the group of "programmers who have to read and debug code"? Yes it is. So it seems really petty to personally insult me for caring (not much, but a little) about something that makes code less bug-prone and easier to read for everybody while you hold up something that affects a vanishingly small number of people as what we should be talking about.

Your complaints seem to reflect an idea that only features and implementations matter, while user interface is fairly trivial. If you believe that, I think you might be interested in this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy/
The problem even with political polls is unless an expected result is obviously hard to fudge, you still need a lot of healthy skepticism, because the money behind a poll tends to subtly skew the results. That's why GOP poll results tend to conflict with DEM results.
My girlfriend made a reservation at a place like this, but she said she had found one that wasn't gender separated... good to know it's a good experience.
I was just barely working on a pacman clone about two months ago... turned into mostly just research. It turns out the ghosts follow rather simple patterns between two modes (spread out / attack) which turn into complex behavior, mostly due to how they interact with each other.

I found this thread very helpful for the Ghost AI: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/68707-pac-man-ghost-ai-...
I'm new to Scala, but I love their alternative with the colorful name "Pimp My Library": http://scala.sygneca.com/patterns/pimp-my-library

In summary, you mark a method as "implicit" which constructors a decorator object with your extension methods. Implicits must be explicitly brought into scope and any ambiguities are a compile time error. This model is much more robust than Ruby's, but owes a lot of it's error-prevention to clever use of static typing.
With Windows Phone 7, they would be essentially selling commodity phones, in a similar vein to Android manufacturers. Going with WebOS potentially puts them into the Apple league, where - if they play their cards right - can allow them to charge a premium and have a strong, dedicated following.
> It's more like a non-stop hallucinatory experience.

This is what I'm hoping for. Awesome.
A tradeoff to be aware of: the introduction of sort raises the complexity of the solution from O(n) to O(nlogn).
I find that people with negative karma are a lot more interesting than those with positive karma, so this is no complaining at all, I would be very proud to be the person with the most negative karma in this group, it should be an honor, so don't complain if I don't appreciate your karma the way you want it.
Yes, please! Tell me in no uncertain terms you will not give away, sell, or crawl my data.

I will then use it as a personal journal for work purposes. Perfect for filling out during the morning with a cup of coffee.
I draw some connections between Adams' model - we're either a Bully, Pushover, or Negotiator - and a framework I've seen that separates most people into either Persecutor, Victim, or Rescuer.

Using that connection, I see two important observations. First, while we may have a tendency towards one over the others, we can play multiple roles - someone might be a Bully / Persecutor at work, and a Pushover / Victim at home with their spouse.

Second, you don't have to play these roles, and in fact playing any of these roles will ultimately make you unhappy because they are each place you in a situation where your feelings are at the effect of other people. The Bully needs other people to persecute; the Pushover takes their power by playing the victim, again requiring other people; and the Negotiator is the most arrogant of the three because they see themselves as having the solution to any dispute, and value themselves by rescuing others.

Much better to focus on yourself and being in control of your own happiness, than to play any role that depends on other people.
This winter I took train from Seattle to Vancouver, BC. There was a security check before boarding the train, but it was much much faster than airport.

Train was patrolled by assault rifle-armed guards in bullet-proof vests, some had dogs. I still trying to imagine what is the threat profile they were trying to respond to.
Quick first glance feedback on the page, take it or leave it:

a) "the easiest way to" lowercase start and then "Write your life story" uppercase start. Seems weird to me. The other way around or both uppercase.

b) Top bar seems empty, maybe an actual logo (that adds some other color/shade) would chance that.

c) "See an example" needs no-Javascript fallback. I assumed a video behind it. Pleasant surprise to see something that finally showed me what it is all about. I strongly suggest not hiding that. It is below the break for me and adds a lot.

d) Ned Flanders takes away the credibility and earnesty the page build up so far. Bad!

e) "private, secure, & friendlier", the comma after secure seems out of place to me. I am not an english native but from what I know it would be more normal without it. "friendlier" is not a word, is it? Also, how is it secure if you do not tell me how you actually secure it (both for normalos and hackers please)...?

f) entry is a bad empty word. I guess you already tried to find a better one. Can't think of one myself. :-(

g) "a personal journal that you'll love to use" = you love the journal

"why you'll love us" = you love the company

h) "Oh snap, remember this?" same as Ned, does not fit the otherwise very noble theme at all.

i) The open book has a weird shape. Does not feel right to me. Maybe if it was taller?

x) No privacy policy (as a techie "only you can see your entries" screams for encryption against YOU (and/or hackers, this is important)), no contact, no nothing to make it human.

y) Privacy tainted by Google Analytics.
If population starts to decline, we'll need some fundamental changes to the economic system.

It's actually worse than that, since it's not the population as a whole, but, rather, the productive, working-age population.

The US (and perhaps the "West" as a whole) is already on the precipice, if not already tipping over, with Baby Boomers hitting retirement age. Even when the more patent Ponzi scheme of Social Security collapses, it won't solve the underlying economic problem, that so few will have to support so many.
India has it fair share of massive bureaucracy and bribery corruption. Plus the basic infrastructure is rather lacking. You don't want to buy electric generator when you are small.