skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His princeton's speech is a personal favorite of mine. And specifically these following questions:

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
There is no single reason, but [edit] doctors salaries are not even a large part of the costs even though they do factor in. Much larger drivers are over use of insurance, and the cost of malpractice insurance for doctors.

By overuse of insurance I mean people going to the doctor every time they have a cough and expecting it to be covered and having every routine visit covered. In comparison, I have insurance on my car, but I don't expect it to pay for oil changes. Many people in this country have their health insurance completely backwards. They are over covered for things they should be paying for out of pocket and severely under covered for what insurance should really be there for, a serious, expensive and long term medical issue.

When you think about a simple doctors visit and then the paperwork and manpower involved to push it through insurance it's no wonder the costs are through the roof. Many doctors have recognized this and now offer nicely discounted rates for people who simply pay cash at the time of service.
Middle Finger Monument in Milan
Maurizio Cattelans is an Italian artist who brought the world to it’s feet. He made a monument shaped as a middle finger that shocked the world.
But as part of their diligence to consider the Yahoo offer, could they not have come to a conclusion such as this one: "given the fact that the management won't go, and that Yahoo won't buy Yelp without a management team, it follows that the Yahoo offer is void and nonexistent. So, let's pursue the Google offer"...?

If for example I offered 3 trillion dollars for Yelp, would the board consider my offer (as opposed to laughing it off)?

I guess my question is, What is the "reality threshold" of an offer?
What city do you live in? Can you break down the $1.5k and $2k rates?
Maybe you should retitle it as Ask HN: What are your experiences with Amazon DevPay?
Than you for teaching me something so important. If you're right, and I know that you are, it explains a lot of things that baffled me as well as why people choose what the choose. Sometimes the best solution isn't the best solution.

Thank you.
Very true. A simple "set everything to zero" approach would probably bring any facility to a halt (if not worse).
Throw in a fast SSD and it will blow your socks off!
If you are doing this by yourself with no system administration expertise then do yourself a huge favor and go with something like Heroku or EY. Note that EY will mean you have to do some sys-admin stuff yourself.

I only have experience with Heroku, but the costs for a new service aren't going to be very high unless you have a lot of data.

For $15 a month you get up to 20 gigs of database on a postgres database.

2 dynos which will handle a ton of users cost $36 a month.

1 worker will also cost $36 a month if it's running constantly. There are a handful of worker scalers out there to dynamically allocate a worker when it's needed and turn it off when it's not.

So for starting up you're looking at 36+36+15= $87 a month (really less than that since your worker won't be running 24/7).

Compare with the cheapest linode plan at $20 a month ($40 if you use 2 machines), plus all the time and hassle dealing with sys-admin stuff and the time it takes away from your product.
For those who want it in video format, here's Bezos on regret minimization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ
Is that about risk then? Or is it about the advantage of being the guy with $2million in his pocket to drop on the business before he even starts, and the connections to get the sweetheart deal with Yodlee?
Looks like your customers have to have an Amazon account before they can purchase. How would you sell such a concept to a company if they do not have an amazon account?

Perhaps I am reading it wrong...

"""
Embed this link in your web site to allow your customers to purchase your product through Amazon. Customers can sign in with their Amazon.com credentials and select a credit card that is stored in their Amazon.com account. After your customers purchase your application, they are directed back to your web site.
"""
Vista (and Windows 7) boot from "hybrid sleep" in less time than it takes my monitor to turn on.

Power draw in "hybrid sleep" is negligible (less than the idle power draw of my 2 LCD monitors in sleep mode).
I know what you mean and I have thought about that kind of thing. However, I for example would like to do something completely different. I have originally studied maths, so I would like to do stuff that requires a lot of maths.

My current jobs involves things like increasing code coverage of unit tests or fixing CSS stylesheets. Sure, I could come up with a new CSS framework or something, but there is not actually that much time allocated for each task.
9 misconceptions about Social Security: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jul/socsec.htm

The first addresses the "accounting fiction" aspect.
It didn't catch on

HSA enrollment has been rising by about 2 million people per year for the last few years, and is now at about 10 million people [1]. I'd say it's catching on.

I cannot recommend the HSA/High Deductible combination highly enough, especially for primary care. The difference between seeing an overworked doctor who is paid by insurance and an independent doctor who is paid by you? Night and day.

For anyone in Seattle, I strongly recommend http://www.qliance.com/ for primary care. Monthly fees for unlimited primary care, probably lower than your phone bill. They're cheap and indescribably excellent. (I don't work for them. I'm not associated with them in any way beyond being an extremely happy customer.)

[1] http://www.ahipresearch.org/pdfs/hsa2010.pdf
"The study found that first generation immigrant children often outperform second and third generation children in school"

You must be kidding. Second, third, ..., eleventh, ...etc ... generations aren't "immigrants". They are just citizens.
We've been talking about this for years, since the bad old days of TF before the turn of the century(1).

Wouldn't it be awesome for online games like TF to have a small "buy in" and then a prize purse for the winners? That might be enough to bring this old fogey back to Team Fortress again.

(1) Yes, kids, they had Team Fortress, on the quake engine, playable online in the 1900's. It was blocky, it was slow, it was guaranteed to be lagged to hell, and we liked it that way. Now get off my lawn.
Not much content in that thread. Has any used this since then? I'm interested to hear from people who have used it. I'm not seeing a whole lot about it in general, seems DevPay got some interest in 2008 and then faded off.
Really simple example of how to avoid closure based Javascript Memory Leaks
This is a terrible article:

* MSFT announced 7 million blogs, not 30 million.

* The article seems to be trying to imply that Microsoft has screwed up the transfer and that 90% of their bloggers have left over it. But it sounds like the real story is just that MSFT left out that 6.7 of their 7 million blogs are dead in their initial announcement.

* The stuff about Azure is a complete non sequitur.
You are most welcome, Zack. I'm glad that you are happy with it and thank you so much for the support.
I did spend almost three years there.
Yes, this is equivalent to the statement "Mint succeeded and Wesabe failed", and not the reason it did.

Mint reached probably an order-magnitude more people ultimately, so it isn't surprising that most of us haven't heard of wesabe.
The main notion of DevPay is to act "on behalf of" a user, in order to outsource billing to Amazon while using the common AWS APIs. Once a user signs up to your service using DevPay you get a custom Access and Secret Key that's bound to this user and allows you to do all S3 actions while he's billed.

Unfortunately this hasn't been introduced for EC2 - they only allow Paid AMIs and no way to start these for your users without having their AWS credentials.
Oh, I should add that you get a lot of great free add-ons that can help your business like New Relic RPM for performance monitoring, memcache, sendgrid, etc. with 1 click setup.
I don't know if I'm anyone's favorite programmer, but I derive enormous satisfaction from building working applications - even unsexy CRUD applications - from nothing. What we do professionally is already god damn wizardry: we turn text into something that moves.
Not true. See the definition:

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

Insurance is not a scheme "destined to collapse" when it runs out of new investors. Insurance is perfectly sustainable. In fact, some of the oldest companies in business today are insurance companies.

Social security is currently "designed to collapse" as the trustees report has warned for years. The program will run out of money sometime fairly soon unless the benefits are cut or the taxes raised. In fact, it has already collapsed several times and a new program has been reinvented, also named Social Security. Initially the payroll tax was 1% and the benefits constituted enough to live on.
You may still have a good UX not because of a designer, but because of business or engineering.

Whether you collect something or not in the first place is a business need. UX is almost always taken into consideration here (will the user give us this information).

Whether or not one automates something factors in UX. However, being able to automate something is often in the hands of engineers.

All these (and more, I'm sure) affect the UX.
Team Fortress 2 has offered absolutely stunning value to the buyer over the past two years. Paying $15+ for DLC for the Call of Duty, GTA and Battlefield games is an absolute joke compared to the massive improvements that have come to Team Fortress 2 from the publisher for free.

What I'd like to see, however, is some hard numbers that demonstrate this has been worth it to them from a financial perspective.
I agree that brands are overrated (not with their complete irrelevance), but the Google argument doesn't prove anything. There is a huge difference in people's willingness to try a new search engine, compared to many other applications. Particularly when it comes to sites that deal with your money. That makes people conservative and want something recognizable.
As someone who just passed out from college and is working on a startup, I would say do as much projects as you can during your college. Hence learn the art of starting and finishing.
Google seems to be using them in search results, particularly with local results (to show location info and ratings). Here is a good intro to microdata and microformats: http://diveintohtml5.org/extensibility.html
Out of curiosity why didn't you like the bit.ly link? I put in that format purely for convenience, readability.
I honestly do not get what is so great about SF. If you lived here long enough, you guys would realize how boring it is. If you want IN-N-OUT that is not overpriced (like Fishman's Wharf) then you go to Daly City. If you want Krispy Kremes, Daly City. If you want to go Bowling, Daly City. However, there are bars and the clubs here for the night life.

If you're getting a studio for $1,000. I guarantee you it will be small, especially for two people unless (read below). Now let me tell you about Sunset. Around 19th street (the main street) is the most expensive and safest, but as you go closer to the ocean the housing is noticeably less great. Trust me on this.

A tip on housing, not much people know about this, so listen up. You will find better housing if you post in the wanted section. I found a few places that were really nice at $1500 excluding utilities (but utilities ended up around ~$70 with dryer and washing machine) and including DSL with two bedrooms. Like how you like to pick your housing, owners like to pick their renters. So, put something nice in your description when you're posting in the wanted section.
There's really a night and day difference between CookieSafe style cookie management and what Chrome offers in terms of usability. CookieSafe is much nicer and no Chrome extensions seem to offer anything similar.
Lone Sale of $4.1 Billion in Contracts Led to 'Flash Crash'
America prospered due to the contribution of H1Bs (Albert Einstein, Linus Torvalds)
Time now for Americans to migrate and contribute to rest of the world.
It occurs to me that I've never seen a link to a techdirt article that worth reading. That streak was not broken by this link.

First, music has long been subject to trademark, so the very title of the article is misleading. Second, the article shows a lack of understanding of the different purposes of and protections provided by trademark and copyright, and raises scary hypotheticals that are not actually possible.
If you're determined to life in SF, don't want to have a car, and want to be reasonably close to where most tech events happen (SOMA), I'd recommend "lower nob hill", which is a nicer way of saying the northern part of the tenderloin. The northern borders would be Pine or california, and the southern borders would be Geary. I wouldn't go any farther south than geary, and the closer to union square, the better. There's studios in that area to be had for $1200 or so. You can always go out the sunset or the richmond, but then transportation becomes a pain and there's nothing out there.

Also, if you're trying to minimize expenses, you're probably better off finding a 1-bedroom or 2-bedroom and getting another 1-2 roommates, as the price of rentals doesn't scale linearly with the number of bedrooms.
I mostly agree with you, but you are forgetting the other side of the coin: the combination of patients that expect perfection and an out-of-control claims culture. Exaggerating: if a doctor explains that some thing (s)he can do has a 90% chance of relative success, at least 10% of patients will sue for malpractice (the unlucky 10% plus some that complain that the procedure didn't 100% work out as expected). Even if they do not get awarded compensations, the legal costs of this must be payed by someone.
a lot of the qr code i've seen on my phone assumes i'm near some other display device seeing the code, and to point the camera at it, i wish i could just tap on a qr code jpg, or well, then again, maybe not :P
Homemade Spacecraft
You're reading it right. You send them through Amazon, where they log in with their usual Amazon credentials and can check your rates. When they confirm the purchase, they are redirected back to your page with their authentication tokens as URL parameters.

Without an Amazon account they can't purchase, although in my experiences this hasn't been brought up as a problem by potential customers.
While this is true, I am building for myself anyway. I'm using this project to test several pieces of new code I have constructed, and I have been using it to manage my own freelance work anyway.
This is an awesome feature. I don't see why they call it an easter egg. Easter eggs are not supposed to be useful ;p
The good part is holding the option key and getting a reasonable environment to choose a startup disk.

My mac is the only computer I've ever had that can boot off a clone of my internal disk stored on a USB extrenal disk. This has saved my ass more than once.

"Target disk mode" is also reasonably awesome.
Ohm 0.1.0 released - Object Hash Mapper for Redis
I doubt it will ever change.

There's a generation of kids growing up right now who think that's an icon which means "save" - they've never seen a floppy.
> Rebel XSi, so quality is not a problem

Because the camera is all that matters, right?
I'll buy a SSD the day a good 512GB one costs less than a month's rent :-)
Who says successful product startups can’t come out of India?
Frankly, it is enough to win.

I suspect that if Mint had executed poorly, they would still have gotten enough customers hanging around just due to the great name that they could have fixed it, recovered, and gone on to success.

Wesabe. I have no idea how to pronounce that. Wasabi? WI-SAYB? WI-SAY-BEE? WEEZ-A-BEE? What the fuck is that? That is the bottom 10% of possible company names. Bottom 5%. It's awful. No one can pronounce it, no one can spell it, and it bears no relation whatsoever to personal finance.

When one company is being boosted by their name every day, and the other is dragging a giant anchor behind them...
I just want to point out that this does not apply to a lot of people outside the US of A. 24.5 USD for a single edition of a magazine is a lot of money in INR. And like many others, I don't find 3 USD worth of value in the pdf. The printed magazine will still be in my bedside rack 3 years down the line. Pdfs are more use, file and forget things.
Ask HN: Thoughts on UCSC's LAMP Certificate?
I am new to to Valley and come from a non-technical background, and I am looking for a crash course in CS to round out my skillset.

The UCSC Certificate in Linux Programming and Administration (http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/programs/linux-programming) was recommended to me as a great place to start and I wanted to get some feedback from the HN community.

Has anyone done this program or anything similar? Thoughts?

Thanks,
John
True... but as we have seen humans too can be overly reactionary.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: How Apple Stays Divine
We've been referring to different things. Since you referred to "indefinite space travel" I thought you were talking about not going to another solar system at all, i.e. that "land" meant orbiting another sun.

But that was obviously a misreading on my part. Anyway, I completely agree with you that once your ark ship arrives in a new solar system landing on a planet like Gliese 581g would be counterproductive.

Instead of having to deal with a gravity well it would be better to make a home in something like the asteroid belt. You only need energy & resources for manufacturing capacity, a gravity well can only complicate that process.

People might still want to live on planets as a novelty, or for their resources. But I think any society sufficiently advanced to develop a generational ship that can traverse interstellar space would resemble The Culture (i.e. a swarm of migrating ships & habitats) more than they would resemble The Federation (i.e. people mostly living on planets with ships mainly for transport).
> But what is the cost of trying to legislate these people away?

Consider that many other first-world nations also legislate away drugs that aren't more effective than a placebo and yet still spend a significantly lower percentage of their GDP on health care.
The idea that there won't be any money left is a common misperception, but it's pretty inaccurate. Since it's a pay-as-you-go system, it can't run out of money like a bank account. Instead, it will simply be taking in less than it should be paying out. The current best estimates are that Social Security will be paying out around 75% of what it should be paying out by the time that people in their 20's now retire. That's still a massive, gigantic problem, but it's a world different from there simply being no payout at all.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/09/01/yes-you-will-ge...
Just move to NYC or SF and you'll be all set:)
We chose the best comments (voted by HNers) of the selected articles (also voted by HNers). We then asked for permission to reprint the comment (yes, even comments). If we did not hear from the author or got declined (seldom happens), we moved to the 2nd best comment of that article.
Thanks. If Heroku will cost me ~$100/month, I can definitely afford it. I just got scared by reading articles where Heroku costs reached 1000s when there was a usage spike.
Environmental story in the disguise of archaeology.
You should incorporate and show your expenditures as losses that will carry over to when your start up eventually becomes profitable. This is standard practice and will rightfully save you money by reimbursing you against your tax liability in the future.
I made this last night after being inspired by http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1302494...

All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!
The 50% statistic is related to what matters to Google: changes in real search results. It is pretty irrelevant for anybody else. The speed of adding a single page to the index and updating is, of course, much, much faster (~1000x).

I can't parse the measure you propose above.
Thanks for the feedback. I am more of an application designer than an artsy one for sure. I guess I will have to start pursuing that angle a bit more in depth.
I'm not really convinced that a programming language that builds products from a subset of pre-made parts by making assumptions about implementation, rather than requiring the designer to plan in full detail and iron out design/logic inconsistencies, would really be all that useful.

But more to the point, I'd imagine a lot of programmers wouldn't even be interested in programming if it wasn't difficult. There's little point to a puzzle if someone just tells you the answer. Coding is all about choosing pieces, putting them together, and questioning whether the way those pieces are used will get you to your ideal solution.

Sure, some people code just to create output. Some people exercise just to burn calories, and hate every minute of it; those probably aren't the people climbing mountains.
James Jannard shoots straight about the RED Scarlet delays
Microsoft Files Patent Infringement Action Against Motorola (over Android)
Mint always reminded me of those little Andes mints. Who thinks of money in terms of a "mint"? My Grandpa?

Especially because mint is about physical currency/coinage, not about electronic transactions.

It is however short and memorable.
Of course, we are talking about the time before the OS loading.

The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary (see my other comment).
Ask HN: What tools do you use the most to be more productive or be more social?
I use Evernote, iCal, Apple Mail, iTerm, Textmate, Tweeti and Skype the most.
Because url shorteners break the web[1][2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Criticism_and_pr...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536662
You might wanna read/watch something about "typical SQL" databases (MySQL?) to compliment the NoSQL. Enjoy!
I think the answer is that they don't want a crappy-looking, buggy product/service that doesn't do much.

Keeping it simple is great, and suggested, but making it useful and nice looking is also very important. Are you sure that it failed because it wasn't simple enough? Maybe it just wasn't filling the right need?
"Mint aggressively acquired users by paying for search engine marketing (reportedly spending over $1 for each user), while Wesabe spent almost nothing on marketing".

Startups need to realize that customer acquisition is an important part of the equation too. Sure technology,UX, and a memorable name is important too but too many people are still thinking if they build a good product, start a blog, twitter everyday is all that is needed to succeed.
The importance of cultivating entrepreneurial mentors
This is nice. Tip: put up all the social media icons.. use sharethis, addthis, or whatever. People like to fb-like more than tweet.