skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends on what you are looking for, and all of the points you made are true. However, Chicago has some great things going for it IF you like living IN the city. Chicago's winters are brutal, but the rest of the year is gorgeous. Chicago overall has much better weather than San Fran, though much worse than the rest of the Bay Area. If you want to raise a family, while living in the city, it is both doable and affordable here. Areas like Wicker Park and Lakeview have pretty tree lined streets, brick 3-flats, amazing restraunts, coffee shops, record stores etc etc. The bars are amazing, good music venues, oh and you will never have to get behind the wheel drunk because you cannot walk 5 feet without seeing a cab for hire. There are great artist and developer communities here, as well as a budding startup scene.

I am not saying you should rush out of San Fran for Chicago, but if you are considering moving here you should give it serious consideration.

One caveat, for the love of god don't move to the suburbs. They are filled with mid-westerners. scary.
I firmly agree with Marc on the issue that to be truly effective personal finance requires people to work more closely with their data. I have been working on a web project of my own for my own personal finance use, as neither Mint, Wesabe, or other web based product do what I needed. The most common response from people I show it to is that it looks really helpful but that they don't have the discipline to organize their finances enough to be useful.

Mint definitely got the "no user thought required" down and this path has brought them [some] financial success. Is their overly simplified view of a complex process actually useful? The consensus for mass market web based personal finance systems so far seems to be

- Users don't care about privacy.

- Users don't care about data accuracy

- Users don't care about digging into their data at all.

- Users will pay for pretty graphs/charts with questionably-useful automatic analysis that is unlikely to make a significant difference in their financial situation.

What is the best thing to do in this case? Just give users what they want? Sell illusions because reality is too hard to deal with? I know there are some people who do care, how do you find them?
Seems like snake oil is a problem either way. FDA testing for efficacy before approving prescription drugs is a totally different ball of fur--unless you expect legitimate physicians to write prescriptions for snake oil?
Amazon DevPay
Real people. Real hot dogs. Deep dish pizza. Awesome neighborhood festivals. Great architecture. And of course, the Cubs.
Parallel efficacy testing across a market is cheap. Efficacy testing under a central federal agency is expensive.
The most interesting project I have worked on for quite a while
Feminism and Microcontrollers: Building new clubhouses with the LilyPad Arduino
I don't think you can pinpoint that and say "That's the problem". As this thread and article demonstrate, there are plenty of things that all work together to make medicine as astronomically expensive as it currently is. They are all valid and it isn't simply going to go away if we reduce demand. The price may fall to try to drive demand back up, but the medical care received will still be relatively expensive. And it's not like we can just tell people who are sick to sit around and hope not to die. I think there are fewer hypochondriacs than is often represented; most people don't go to the doctor unless they need some medical attention.
This is much better, but 2048 pixels is still significantly smaller than modern high-quality digital cameras produce. It would be better if they weren't scaled down at all.

They also don't mention what happened to previously uploaded photography. Presumably there's no way to get the high-quality originals upscaled now and users have to re-upload them.
Also, check the comments here for "Garry's SF Guide to Where Your Startup Should Be":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510553
But what is the cost of trying to legislate these people away?
In relation to Mac OS, you may be interested in this: http://hackthemac.blogspot.com/2008/08/chubby-bunny-old-virt...
Not a lot better. Possibly no better. But certainly much worse than "Excite" or "Yahoo," whose lunches Google ate. That's my point here.
Exactly right. I don't understand why there can't be a Javascript 2.0 that fixes its ridiculous misfeatures, and that you opt-in to with <script language="js2"> or something. So browsers would have to include two interpreters, but they're so bloated as it is I doubt it would be noticeable.
Does anyone know how to disable the mobile view on this site on Android? It clips the images, in particular.
Goo.gl URL shortener can also spit out QR codes
Padding Oracle Affects JSF, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET
I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website.

I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month.

This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have helped much.

I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!
All of the stuff said here re: building a product and working for a startup is awesome advice. There's one major thing missing: Learn how to acquire customers and retain them. You can build a great product, but if you don't know how to acquire customers, it's a disservice to the great product you built. CREAM- Customers Rule Everything Around Me.
(a) - When she would have to choose whether to pay $10 or $30 per month for the facebook.

(b) - Experience, when down the road a year or two from now it will mean some real eyeballs. If you do not care about serving to mobile users, no need to bother. Maybe there are startups that are not just about webapps.

(c) - they already have IPv6. On Vista and Windows7. Just that it travels over Teredo. Reason: visibility into the end-station traffic.

I am not trying to convince you that IPv6 is the panacea. If you show me the compelling argument towards the standard p2p substrate that would not abuse the links between the ISPs too much, is standardized, has implementations in all the major OSes as part of standard distribution with similar API - or freely available in the source code form with the BSD or MIT license - I'd be happy to see it. Oh yes - and you can show the business cases for it for the above three participants, too, if you like. Oh, and of course it has to traverse multiple layers of NATs too.

I'd seriously use it in some of the pet projects.
I actually am considering picking up a scooter when infer there, as I've already got a motorcycle license. Does anyone have experience getting around on one in sf? Is it possible to make it out of the city to somewhere like mountain view / San Jose on a scooter, or does it require going on high speed highways?
He could also try http://texttrust.com/

(I helped build this product as a co-op many years ago...)
I wonder if they considered as possible explanation better primary schools outside of USA.
When I estimated my costs Social Security was roughly $5,400.00 a year yet I keep hearing that when I get to retirement age that there won't be any Social Security left.

This is a bad investment or we need to rethink the ways in which that money is being use. Because that seems like a lot of money for a program which may never benefit me.
Are you searching for mediator Jobs
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You actually need some income to qualify for EITC. It's refundable, in that you can pay negative taxes after EITC, but it's calculated as a percentage boost to your earnings (up to a threshhold), since it's intended to help the working poor. If you have no earnings, you get no boost.
This is good to know, just like startups it's better to iterate early and often
Politicians love competition. If there is a bidding war between rival lobbyists, that's a good thing... for the politician.
You'll very rarely see the sunset from here though.

Let me clarify what smokestack is saying. The weather in the Sunset district is reliably foggy and cool or chilly. Most people don't like it.
Running some local photo sharing sites in Europe myself, with tens of millions of photos, I would say people rarely open the originals or anything larger than 2048. Originals make sense only for historic archiving and paper prints. 99% of users never look at anything larger than what fits on their screen.

Most photo sites keep the originals for future upscaling though, I would assume Facebook has done this as well? Storage is cheap. Even Youtube I believe has kept all the originals uploaded, even when they offered crappy low-res videos on the site. Correct me if I'm wrong.
What about the poor people looking at the images?
I think the point is that they should learn enough jQuery before maintaining jQuery code.
À la carte governance might be a good idea (though it sounds likely to produce the largest expansion of the IRS anyone has ever seen), but is there any empirical information on the use of such a system in governance? It is not too much to ask that the idea be tested and proven on smaller levels.
SEC blames algorithmic trading for May's Flash Crash
Hah, fair enough! Pixar seems to be doing a fine job in an environment similar to that one though. Probably depends on the job you're doing too. I couldn't imagine walking into a bank that has clerks on a pirate ship... or maybe I could.
Technology investment across the economy has never recovered to 1999
I don't think the name is that great, to be honest. Not a native speaker, though.

I had to hear the name several times before I could remember that it is a company related to money management.

Wesabe is just extremely bad, though. I keep thinking it might be the scripting language of FogBugz, which is probably horrible (as most proprietary computer things are).
Strongly agree with this. Also, it's worth noting that many people consider "startup"=creating a consumer-focused company with millions of users (i.e. Twitter; Yelp.) Often the most successful businesses focus on selling a lot to a little. There is a ton of opportunity on the enterprise side of the world.

My company was most successful after we stopped offering small accounts and focused on the customers paying us hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. We got pretty quickly to 7 figures after that.
Singapore Math Adopted in More U.S. Schools
Ask HN: Anyone working on a hardware startup?
Hi there, it would be great to know if some of you are working hardware startups. Especially hardware-software hybrids (PG suggested this might be hot). Do you think there are some breakthroughs to come in consumer devices? Isn't the iPhone all people want?

Share your thoughts, please. Thank you.
Some parts of the world have competition. So this issue shouldn't stop us globally from getting rid of routers at home.
I love the textures. I also love the contrast of the wood and concrete. It also looks very well lit.

The first thought that came to mind was that this is the type of office space that Howard Roark would architect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead#Architectural_...
Ask HN: Review my project for Inflight Wifi Tracking
http://www.haswifi.com

Launching a project I've thought about for a while and finally just built. Basically, it's an attempt to track which flights have inflight internet access and uses the same "yes/no" as BugmeNot to better distinguish between Wi-Fi enabled flights. Right now, only carriers using goGo services are targeted and out of those, I'm missing are Alaska, Frontier and Air Canada. However, I hope to have them added over the next couple weeks.

Anyways... feedback, comments, criticism, guidance, suggestions and questions are all encouraged.
The title of this post (and the WSJ article) is potentially misleading.

The 'Algorithm Trade' referenced was a Mutual Fund company executing a very large sell order in E-mini Futures. The sell order was executed through a trading algorithm which attempted to participate in 9% of market volume.

Many people associate 'Algorithmic Trading' with 'High-Frequency Trading' but there is no link made by the report.

ETA: An equally correct headline could be "Large Institutional Seller set off May 6 flash crash.
A lot of people tend to go to where the hype is. For instance if the money is in real estate, you will see them there. The same with IT. Some people think that they are going to get a lot of money for doing little work in IT and unfortunately in a lot of cases they get away with it.

In one of my interviews for a job, the code I was asked to write was a table in HTML. That shows intent by the company (which is awesome) but also ignorance by the person that was taking the interview. For whatever reason that person was there, getting paid a lot of money and there I was, to report or work with that person (should I accept the job).

Close to the year 2000, there was a survey conducted in London, which revealed that 10% of the IT personnel at the time was supporting the remaining 90%.

Sad but I have seen it and it all stems from managers not having the guts to keep the knowledgeable people and fire the ignorant ones.
I had a very promising interview at Yelp right around that time last year. I have a feel for this sort of thing, and I was damned sure I got the job. Great fit for my experience and skills.

Never heard anything back from them.

I'm gonna guess that this was at least partially related.
A scooter is great for SF, easy to park, but to get almost anywhere outside the city of interest -- east bay, silicon valley -- requires getting on the highway. Mountain View is 45+ minutes away by highway; San Jose 1hr+.
Probably because they're less reflective and reduce eye strain.
The closer you get to popular neighborhoods, the more expensive.

Avoid the Tenderloin and Bayview/Hunter's Point. Yes, they have cheap rent. They also have high crime rates, drug usage, etc.

Some of the most inexpensive but nice areas to live are in the Sunset(near Ocean Beach along the N-Judah MUNI line) and Twin Peaks. The problem with Twin Peaks is that you get a great view and slightly lower rent, but there are no trains that go up there and limited MUNI bus lines. You're also not quite next to any popular places, so its not as easy as walking out your front door to go to the bar.

I live in Lower Haight near Haight St & Filmore. I'm paying about $1000 a month for my house that I'm sharing with one roommate. However, I only have this lucky situation because I've lived here for 3 years, and my old roommate for 2 years before that. So I've basically inherited a lower rent.

Craigslist is the primary place to find apartments in SF. Be aware of the occasional scam. If you see postings that are too good to be true, i.e. low rent for an otherwise awesome place, be wary. Typically when you reply to these, you will get an email a day or so later where the person is saying they are out of the country and that after you make the deposit, they will mail you the keys. No, no no no no. Stay away from these scammers.

One of your best bets would be for you and your roommate to find one or two other people that are either looking for people to fill vacancies in a house, or looking to get a big house together. There are many houses in SF that have 3-7 rooms, so often you can find inexpensive rooms like that.

You might also have luck with the last idea yourself. Given the number of people on HN that live in or around SF, you and your buddy might be able to hook up with some locals and rent a new house together, or might even find suitable vacancies in a geek-friendly house. =)

Here's the craigslist link you want to use http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa
This is funny to me too. There are a million and one calendars/todo lists,etc. yet all I want is something a little bit above a plain white page / text editor. Nothing fancy, nothing crazy.
I've used the Singapore Math materials for homeschooling my four children. (The oldest is off to university as a computer science major.) The article describes the program as being slower to progress through concepts than most United States programs, but that is true only at the very beginning. By third grade, the Singapore curriculum generally is more advanced in its expectations than most curriculums used in the United States, and laying a good foundation ultimately means much better success at algebra in seventh grade.
In the traditional colony-ship scenario you'll have had to solve the self-sufficiency problem. So additional matter and energy will only be used and run out inasmuch as you're developing and creating new things beyond the originally-conceived equilibrium point of your ship.

As that's likely something an inventive race will always do, I'll grant matter and energy exhaustion even though it wouldn't be in the form of 'running low on food/fuel'.

But even then, matter and energy are far more safely and easily found, harvested and retrieved if you never enter any planet's gravity well.

If you're thinking more along the lines of a hyper-space scenario, where FTL technology is achieved before self-sufficiency is solved, sure, you'd have more-traditional 'supplies' and need to land and colonize Earth-like planets.
Ask HN: Non-Techie trying to learn code. Please help with my course outline
Hi HN,

I'm a non-techie biz guy who wants to learn how to code. I signed up for membership at ThinkVitamin (run by Carsonified) and they have an awesome library of tutorials. But what they're lacking is a roadmap for learning these languages. Could any please give me some guidance? My ultimate goal is to start playing around with building my own web app, or at least have a better understanding of code.

The courses available are:

HTML & CSS (already watched),
Javascript (already watched),
HTML5,
JQuery,
JavaScript,
UX,
CSS3,
Design,
Ruby,
PHP,
Ruby on Rails,
NoSQL,
Accessibility,

Thanks!
Also, can anyone speak to the social scene of the different neighborhoods? Since we're not going to know anyone when we get out there it's important that we live somewhere where we can make friends either through good bar scenes, or startup meetups. Does anyone have experience moving to Sf without knowing anyone and making friends?
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.

Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.
It seems like making a bad decision was key to Mint's success. They built their service so that it relied on the existence of an insolvent, unstable company and got lucky. Yodlee didn't implode, so their shortcut paid off.
Can I run JS from the command-line yet? e.g., jsrun code.js
You too should try coffeescript— the compiler has a watcher built in that makes the compilation completely transparent. For me at least, the time saved vastly outweighs adding that one step to project setup.

I always commit both files (.coffee and .js) together, so I know for sure that the compiled version is up to date.

(With the disclaimer that the CoffeeScript syntax is still unstable, so it probably shouldn't be used for anything mission critical.)
I'll have to respectfully disagree. The TL is sketchy, but there are so many crackheads/witnesses/cops around since it's close to city center, overt violence is more rare than you'd think.

The mission is my favourite district in the city, and it's close to everything. If I had to live in the city, I'd live in the mission.

The sunset is crap. It's like a suburb that's attached to the city, especially outer sunset, where the rents are cheaper. It's blocks and blocks of houses, and very family oriented. There are a few good places in the sunset, but it's almost essential to have a car there, and you can't really go bar hopping, and it's about 20 minutes to drive to downtown.
I'm in similar shoes. I've recommended this essay on HN before, but I found it to be really insightful.

http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html

I've basically come to the conclusion my time here in school is gain enough knowledge an experience in my field that when startup time comes I'll not just be quicker than competitors, but I'll know of better methods and techniques for doing so.
sigh

No it's not. The salaries are in fact the only reason we have this problem, so that's the key to the solution. And no, we don't consume "more care" than any other country (Japanese do way more).
Excellent, clear thinking; thank you for this analysis. I wanted to ask more about:

we both totally failed at... actually helping people.

Changing people's behavior is really hard.

Yes, but it seemed to me -- and this post confirms -- that Wesabe was genuinely thinking about this problem of how to get people to change behavior, to improve their lives. Mint seemed (and still seems) to have a much lower ambition in this respect.

Question #1: Was Wesabe actively engaging in experiments in how to help people/change behavior? I know the support community did help some people, but it sounds from your post that in its existing form it didn't do something palpably different from what people would do on their own. So it seems that Wesabe ought to have been building as many experiments as possible, hoping for something that seemed (at least anecdotally, at first) to help some subset of users above-and-beyond what they were able to do elsewhere.

I suspect Wesabe was running some experiments but too few. If that's true, what prevented those experiments from happening? Infrastructure work/scaling challenges/security concerns? Was the employee or user count too high to efficiently run experiments?

Question #2: If Wesabe was running a good number of experiments, why was Wesabe unable to secure investment for a longer runway of more experiments? After fixing the Yodlee problem (which I agree was a major problem), Wesabe seemed well positioned to lead in experiments to change behavior. The space still seems enormously ripe for innovation. So why did new funding not happen? Was Mint's success demotivating? Was the timing bad, given the economic downturn?
You can certainly make it all the way to San Jose without going on the freeway, but it's tough going. If you already know how to ride a motorcycle why not get a proper motorcycle for a few thousand more?