skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CobraInsuranceBenefits.org
COBRA Insurance Benefits (cobrainsurancebenefits.org) is launched to provide federal and state based information about the COBRA law. Users can learn about their benefits using COBRA or its alternatives.
> If governments would just let people be, poverty would be eliminated. In fact, poverty is the pinnacle achievement of government.

This is either breathtakingly naïve or terrifically disingenuous. Human history shows us many times and places that had little or no government intervention, and such milieux weren't exactly the utopias that lzw seems to claim. When governments "just let people be", we get robber barons, rapacious working conditions, and a beaten-down underclass. The golden age of the middle class in the US occurred in the decades following labor reform, regulation, and the social safety net; and I don't even need to claim that this correlation is causative to cite it as a counterexample to lzw's patently absurd suggestion here.
Bookmarked, thanks.
I don't like the government subsidizing stadiums either. At least, very recently, Seattle decided not to build a new basketball stadium and as a result the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma. I think that was the right call. I just wanted to point that out just so nobody falsely accuses you of painting with too broad a brush in the future.
> I got the sense that the outrage died down only because Reddit promised to migrate its paid features into the "free" arena. Until then, a lot of people were angry that there was going to be some kind of "elite" class on the site.

As a Charter and gold reddit member... not really. It was well understood early on that most of the "gold" features would be stuff that was too expensive (computationally) to give to everybody (especially before the server upgrade), at least from the start.

The great fear gripping everybody was truly that Reddit would somehow become "for-pay", and that content previously free would now become non-free (a fear which didn't make much sense as the community is the one providing the content, and the admins might not be too media and ad-savvy, but they're not stupid)

> But either way, in that specific case, there would have been some vocal rebellion if the paid-for features stayed locked behind a paywall.

Doubtful. 1000 comments/thread is a nice feature for instance, but it didn't exist (at all) before gold and it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
I always thought this was the preferred method. Worst case scenario you tie the same event to the enter key and the button.
>> However, every article offers thorough and detailed reasoning of why something is suggested as a best practice. The reasoning is key.

I could show you 10 thorough and detailed product pitches from seasoned and experienced people for Farmville. 8 out of those 10 pitches turn out to be utter failures in the field.

Hacker News has little patience for armchair theory. Why do you think patio11 is so highly regarded? It's because he shows us why our rational thinking about users is wrong straight from the trenches.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616704
BankSimple is getting real
I'm in Santa Barbara and am very interested.
Well, I'm far from your ideal contact, since I have no experience besides an interest in such systems from a technical point of view.
You are mischaracterizing his argument. It is 100% economic.

The "practicality of it" is to make the economy more sound, not some slavish devotion to laissez faire ideals for subjective reasons.
(note: I live in Germany)

This never made sense to me. Prior to Street View, at least two German companies did the same thing (photographing every street with essentially the same technology,and putting it online). Noone complained. Now that Google is doing it, it's suddenly a huge privacy nightmare. I just don't understand.
That's not really practical... There aren't enough schools around, and not everyone can afford private school.

Also politically, it's the unfortunate reality that parents are not the only interests that must be served. All parents want the highest quality teachers for the lowest costs, of course that's just impossible.
Looking for dress up games?
BestGuyWins.com has a large directory of online flash games,which grows daily. Each game has a score,to allow you to find the best games fast.
So you would seem to support my argument. Bush's propaganda may have been enough to get the middle class on board to support his wars, but I imagine that if it'd come with a tangible price tag the propaganda would have failed miserably.
Forgive my replying to my own thread, but I would like acknowledge that much of the way public institutions do things is currently broken, even if the idea of public institutions is great -- I am very sympathetic to all the libertarians here at HN even as I vehemently disagree with them (I would say I am in favor of decentralized socialism, run by Athenian style democracies). Bad management of epidemic proportions (which I grant -- e.g. see "Waiting for Superman") makes people susceptible to a simplistic anti-government "privatize everything" sentiment (which I think is downright goofy).

But I still believe in taxing the rich, since they feed off society at least as much as they contribute.
The obvious move would be to replace the bookshelves and books (among other texts and publications) with a bunch of computers and free/paid Internet access. But the biggest problem, I think, would be making sure that people are actually using those new resources for what they are meant to be used for and not for something else like updating their Facebook status or watching Charlie Bit My Finger on YouTube.
> where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom?

In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"
This. I was appalled when I realized that MySQL will quietly seem to execute

select x from y group by z

x isn't a grouping column or an aggregate function, so where does it get the value for each group? It just arbitrarily picks a value from one of the rows, even if the other rows had different values!
First off exactly like folz and others have said. Make something. BUILD SOMETHING as people often call it. It can be as simple as you want.

Make sure to avoid feeling inferior with whatever it is however it comes out. ALOT of programming is learning by doing. Don't get caught up in well "all I did was x". You can still learn alot from actually having done x that can help you when you eventually want to make y.

Next its good that you are getting started early.

I wish I had the foresight to ask this question of a community like HN (much less known about/ had HN) back in high school especially so I could have gotten started working on subjects like the ones you can read here

http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-take-to-become-a-programme...

I've been learning programming since about middle school (about to graduate from college now) and I'm still learning everyday. People well into their careers from CEOs to new hires will tell you the same.

Dive into something, start small and scale up. You'll be amazed at what you can come up with given time.
IBM bought data analytics firm
Near my home (southeastern Pennsylvania), if you pull up to an intersection and there's no traffic in the opposing direction, the light changes so you get a near-immediate green. It works great at night when nobody else is near the intersections.

I noticed the same thing when I lived in Seattle for a few months.

I doubt the signals are communicating with each other, but there is definitely some deployment of signals with sensors to detect whether a car is waiting on each side of the intersection.
Obamacare is a trademark for the right wing propaganda package about health care reform -- death panels, communism, etc. I would say the Obama Health Care Plan or the Democratic Health Care Plan would be completely fair.
I think it is more to do with the reputation that Google is gaining and also the fact that they already have a /tremendous/ amounts of information about their users and it is another part of that information collection drive which can and will be connected to the rest and thus making it much more comprehensive.
What is the problem with pdf ?
Editing a document in html is too painful.
I thought that the one thing that came out of PARC (after it was started using the mountain of cash you mention) that paid for the entire thing was the laser printer patent? So they got you either way :-)
Currently, this seems more interesting to me as a GCD[1] technology demo. Looking at #initialize and #open in the code[2] shows how easy GCD can be to use. Create a queue and add tasks (in this case as Ruby "do" blocks).

I'm looking forward to someone posting some benchmarks comparing ControlTower's connections per second and speed to other web servers.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/snowleopard/gcd....

[2] http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/ControlTower/trunk...
It was when you implied that any government spending beyond some picked-by-you minimum level of service can only ever be waste for corrupt politicians and government employees.
this is a great article and really hits home. Coming full circle and realizing the choices were shallow is the true lesson.
Even if you could go back in time and tell yourself otherwise you couldn't change your mind.

It's all about the journey.
I live in SLO. I am also very interested. My email is in my profile.
It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be.

I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
"The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens"

-Robert Maynard Hutchins, "The University of Utopia"

See also, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent" by John Erskine
How do you know the market price of education when we don't have a market for it? My take is that breaking the public school monopoly (possibly via a widespread voucher system) would result in more competition... this would have the familiar effects... better value, lower prices, etc.
(ITYM js2-mode) No.

I use this to indent my JS: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1936

You could use JSLint plugin to get more of the features, but I've never gotten it to feel like js2-mode.
I was pretty disappointed that there were no pictures of said spiders in the article. There are some better pictures of everything in the discover magazine article on the same subject: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/09/1...
My family could not afford private school either but we did go to private school just the same. For many years. So I don't believe coercion is the answer when charity has work and can work if given the chance.

But most people are paying and are able to pay. They just aren't paying directly.

And there aren't enough private schools around because they've been crowded out and undercut by schools that don't have to compete. They just take the money they want.

And the results have been destruction.

No, it is the current system that is impractical. People have notions about what education should be and despite the bad results are will ing to keep sacrificing the best interests of the children to avoid rethinking their assumptions or engaging in fundamental debate. They prefer to keep repeating the same tired cliches.
Use it to schedule "near time" jobs that are not suitable to do inline during a web request.
The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same.
See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples.

But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.
Eric Forman lives.
Looks a lot like groupme http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/groupme-born-at-techcrunch-...
See this chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2010_Receipts_%26_Expendit...
I need help - looking for someone with the/some of the following skills.

1. ajax/css - strong skills in UI and design
2. Iphone app development

This would be purely client side programming/skill requirements.

email me your contact info: spydre100@yahoo.co.uk: martin.
See my comment in a related thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711490
It's possible to define symbols in header files (for example, inline functions).
Marketing for a social/answers site
how would you market/advertise a startup site that is community driven and social. say hypothetically it's a site like wiki answers. google adwords doesn't make any sense. what about ads on reddit? what else?
Host can I host a file on a CDN?
Hi, I'm writing a jquery plugin and wondering what would be the best way to host this plugin on a CDN for my users?
Thanks, Thomas
What else would I do?

Dance, man, dance!
Actually, the CRA has very vague requirements, which led it to be used as a tool in a political process whereby community activists worked to block expansion of banks which did not meet their criteria. When stuck between the requirement that an institution's CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner and the vocal opposition of politically powerful groups, the regulators did the logical thing in their situation and avoided bad publicity by relaxing standards. In addition, the law was changed to require Fannie and Freddie to do more business in low to moderate income areas in the early 2000s, which defacto reduced their standards and allowed a great deal of crappy subprime paper to be stamped with an implicit (later explicit) government guarantee. If it weren't for this last part, a lot of those loans could not have been securitized. The flood of low quality mortgages did not come as a result of regulatory laxity but of legislative intent, and that is the story that is not being told.
Someone is working on a kde4 port, see comments at http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KDirStat?content=10159

Gnome also comes with something similar.
I used to live in SLO and went to Cal Poly. I am in Palo Alto now but would love to help anyway I can! My address is in my profile, email me
This might be the funniest thing I've read on HN.
Is Auto Mass Traffic A Scam? Read Our Shocking Results
Will Auto Mass Traffic help flood your website with free targeted visitors? You'll be shocked when you read our results. Exclusive Auto Mass Traffic Review reveals the truth.
That'd be fine and dandy, except that people have seen fit to create a lot of social structures that essentially clean up the mess bad parents create at everyone else's expense.

If someone does a really shitty job parenting, they're not the big loser in that equation. A lot of really bad parents can and do wash their hands of their ill-behaved children, who become ill-behaved adults, who eventually become a drain on society in general.

If we had a social system with a really hard floor -- not just 'no welfare' or modern social services as we think of them, but something where you basically don't spend any money on imprisonment but just execute anyone who begins to look like a net cost -- then you could really let things go. Bad parenting styles would get weeded out pretty quickly, I'd imagine.

But that's not how things work and most people wouldn't be really keen on living in a system that did that. The cost of having 'safety net' arrangements that spread out the cost of fucking up is almost always a loss of freedom of action, due to the safety-net-related externalities that fuckups now involve. There are lots of cases where that might be a fine tradeoff, but it's a tradeoff nonetheless.

Having and raising children are actions so fraught with externalities, and the trend of societies seems to be in favor of greater 'safety net' systems, that I doubt very much that the trend towards greater state involvement in child-rearing will reverse itself.
That doesn't mean that someone can't do it better…
Looking back at OS X's origins
I think I need to move somewhere that autocompletes to java.
Is it actually that hard to fire teachers? The numbers I can find indicate that, depending on the state, around 3-5% of "tenured" teachers are fired every year. That's definitely a higher for-cause termination rate than anywhere I've worked. It's also higher than in many of the countries that have good school systems.

I'm not exactly sure what the solution is, but I don't think simply firing teachers will do much. Even firing teachers and raising pay, while both are probably necessary (if you're offering $30k/year, don't be surprised that you get $30k/year types of applicants), doesn't solve the worst problems. Some schools are just a mess of poor discipline that's hard to get a handle on; you could have strict performance reviews and pay $70k/year and I think there are schools that will still be difficult to fix.

One particular problem with giving administrators more authority to fire people is that I have this sneaking suspicion that they'll actually fire the best teachers! The best teachers I had in high school were mostly not very popular with the administration, because they deviated a bit from the official line and were actually effective at teaching, instead of treating the entire class as year-long prep for a multiple-choice test, Kaplan-style. Principals and superintendents are by and large like a less competent version of your stereotypical corporate middle-management, rotating in and out of schools and districts in 2-4 years, changing policies arbitrarily to leave their mark on things and not staying around to see them through, all aimed at moving up the ranks. Anything that gives them more power without first greatly reforming that system is bad imo.
He's also missing the point that he's in the vocal minority of people who are not motivated by the tax rate and that there are many other people who expend time and money hiring accountants and lawyers to structure their investments in ways that avoids these taxes. Why pay 28 to 35 percent when you can pay 15 percent, which probably ends up looking more like 18 percent after all the fees? These people do not go around writing articles about it because they don't want any attention from the media or the IRS but they certainly do exist.
I'm going to guess you've never had to give a deposition. You know those articles that keep getting posted here about how you shouldn't ever say anything to a police officer? It's kind of like that.
Shit, I thought JSON had taken over by now. Well, I guess html is XML, and
you know they say XML is like violence; if it didn't solve your problem is because you didn't use enough...
But that's the thing, it's only managing processes, not scheduling them nor managing the minutia of their stacks — it devolves that responsibility to the real kernel by using 'dumb' native processes instead of inventing its own fucked coroutines with a browser-wide GIL for all the logically-independent javascript environments.

It is less OS-like than any other major browser!
I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever.

If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction, they would be an ex-employee very quickly. I'm not a dictator or a micromanager -- I do my best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. But sometimes, someone needs to take charge and make a decision.

If someone's ego can't cope with that, they are bad for the business, and need to go.

If you have to bite someone's head off to get them to do their job, that's not confidence -- that's arrogance. Two very different things.
Doctors use lasers to blast worm living behind man's eye for nine months
I have couple of ideas that we could implement together and look at starting a venture. Would you be interested in joining me?
Hi Thomas, I've got a project you might be interested in. Email me your contact info and we can chat. rudeegraap@gmail.com
-Kris
> Bush sent a bunch of poor uneducated minority kids to war

This is why politics should stay out of HN.
That's very interesting. I will have to take a look.

I think the point you brought up about the observance of younger children of their superiors is very true. I can recall fond moments of watching my father work on our early DOS machine. I used to play Doom II and Duke Nukem on Sunday nights as a kid and seemed to learn DOS quickly. However, as I stated earlier, it wasn't until later in high school that my interest seriously grew.
As long as you're willing to train people up, this sounds like a great way of doing business. You get cheaper employees, with the trade-off of having to educate them (which costs time), and they get both useful skills and a reference (in exchange for taking a much lower rate of pay).

Definitely not a zero-sum game. :)
He's already taken the original post down, did anyone capture it and want to repost?
If it were a full book I would pay for it. If there were a donate button on the site, I would donate. The site was great but the sample was amazing, especially the chapter on agile.
I don't think so. A link to the paper please.
Lean Startup course
Ask HN: Has anyone ever skipped customer development?
I am wondering if anyone here bootstrapping a startup has ever not "gotten out of the building" and just went ahead and build stuff and actually succeeded in gaining traction.

Paul Graham said to look for a pain point, build a quick prototype, and use said prototype as a pretext to engage potential customers, from whom feedback would be obtained to reiterate the product until it becomes something that people want. That's what we did, but feedback has been slow to come (we have a B2B app for a niche market), and we have little idea on how to proceed without much feedback with which to move forward.

My question is, is it ever too late to do customer development, hopefully without pivoting too much? How do we know if we have built something that people want? Are there case studies about startups "evangelizing" a not-wanted product (e.g. due to its infancy, "too-early-for-its-time" syndrome) into a wanted product just by educating the market?
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