skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New rule: If you're making a point that involves use of the word "Government" as a proper noun, your point is probably dumb.

Just to break it out a tiny bit -- within the federal government, you have SS, Medicare, domestic discretionary spending and military spending. These 4 are radically different from each other, they get their revenue from different sources and have entirely different raisons d'etre. So, I repeat, if you're making a point about "Government", and you can't be bothered to delve into the least bit of detail besides some handwaving about "regulation" and "taxation", your point is stupid.

I only read the first paragraph. Does he make a coherent policy recommendation anywhere? I can get "government this, government that" at my local tea party meeting.
Thanks ojilles. I like the idea of IRC, never came to my mind !
(Waring: US-centric answer)

I agree that capitalism relies on government-supported stability and infrastructure, but I don't think Carmack was arguing the opposite point:
>>This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services ...

The argument concerns dollars spent at the margin. Should the amount of government we have increase, or should it decrease? At the margin, I agree with Carmack that there are many places where we would be better served with less interference, and that we should be cautious about adding new government programs. Clearly there is some fuzzy line between "the justice system" and "corn subsidies". I wouldn't argue that the government has all the program it needs, but neither would I argue that the government needs all the programs it has.

At the risk of flame baiting: I wish I could vote for fiscal conservatism without also voting for hateful and intrusive social conservatism. I also have low confidence in either major party reducing the government in the areas of real excess (see farming), as opposed to e.g. creating new pork-flavored subsidies in the guise of tax relief. Suggestions for concrete ways to battle Parkinson's Law are welcome.
Well, I want the phone also as a mini laptop. I read that it's hard to do things like ctrl-s on the virtual keyboard.
It might be useful to offer a text based chat, that could then progress into a video chat. My thought here is that the text based chat might lower the barrier for some users that are nervous of diving into video.
You can't argue with profit.
CF here as well. Tried writing in CFScript over the years but got tired of having to go to tags for certain things. Will give it another shot when we upgrade to CF9 which has full support. We are moving some processes to another language (prob C# on database) for stability/performance reasons, and will probably consider alternatives for any big new projects.
I recalled it from having lived through the last couple of decades but since you insist, I googled for "Iraq Trained Terrorists" and found 2.2million links.

Heres one. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...

Heres another.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html

One more.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/14...

I don't know how partisan these articles or newspapers/publishers are, but you asked for citing.

Oh, here's another one, PBS this time.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interv...

Feel free to upvote my prior post, thanks.
http://imgur.com/kw2av

:D ummm. ycombinator

I read another comment about reddit / stumble / digg / etc...
So I'll have to go there next. For today, once I get tag-navigation done (it's looking pretty sweet already) then I guess a reddit submission.

Since I regularly read reddit I'll feel a little more comfortable with the community there. Hopefully they'll be as supportive as HN is :)

I really do feel nervous about making sure people like it, and making sure it's good enough to show off.

Showing work in progress to HN is a bit of a different story because we're all such "doers" around here. I guess I just feel "safer" starting here. (if that makes sense?)
WOW! Thank you so much! I've never considered a single of these things, thank you so much for the time and ideas. I've just added all of these things to my to-do list for AB testing!
World’s fastest supercomputer unveiled in China
maximum efficiency happens when people are out of work

I'm glad you cleared that up. That explains government economics pretty well, yes.
I used to work in a braille lab during my masters. Braille lab would generate braille books and reading material depending on blind students' request.

For regular text, we used to do a simple text conversion and print it using a special printer called braille embosser. We used a software called duxbury for the purpose. http://www.duxburysystems.com/dbt.asp

For math(non single line), braille uses something called, nemeth code. So we used code almost all the math functions/equations manually in nemeth code.

For graphics, we used to emboss 2d picture on a special paper. The process involved, scan the picture -> convert it into a grayscale -> remove all the noise -> take a print out -> use a tactile embosser to put it on a swell touch paper (http://www.abledata.com/abledata.cfm?pageid=19327&top=15...) Typically, a chart or graph or waveforms were key in understanding the material.

During the process I interacted with few blind cs engineers who were graduated and were working for Microsoft. At that time(10yrs ago), Microsoft was the best blind friendly company. They used the visual studio for daily hacking.
I should add "try to make a living out of freelancing while you're looking for a much deserved better place to work; it seems to be you have what it takes"...
First of all, my company just released a private beta for a large "desktop class" web application where our client flat-out told us to ignore Internet Explorer, to not use any Flash (audio playback is a big part of what it does), and to concentrate our efforts on creating the best possible user experience on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So much for "no one would hire them".

Right now it makes a lot of sense to only target WebKit browsers simply because it's the only decent rendering engine that's available on decent mobile phones. Zepto could easily support a mobile version of Firefox or IE once Firefox catches up in terms of performance and size and IE catches up in terms of support for HTML5, CSS3 and other emerging web standards.

Finally, stating that "web developers don't understand that distinction" sounds slightly derogatory, don't you think?
I think I'm still at my "collect underpants" phase :)

(EDIT: for anyone who doesn't get the reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park))
The FileAPI has even less support than XMLHttpRequest 2. Specifically, you are linking to a spec that was updated on tuesday of this week: "W3C Working Draft 26 October 2010". It will be excellent once we can do chunked uploads but this is still a vastly better experience then <file> fields!
Hah, same here. I graduated Summer of 2007, so I probably had him in the Spring 2007 class. As a tenured professor, he could've easily made me see a TA when I had questions. Instead, he let me come to his office and worked with me for a while on problems that were tough for me but rote for him. I really appreciated it.
Yes, but being an anarcho-capitalists is a very interesting rabbit hole.

For once, a subset of ancap are able to engage in dealing with a Neal Stephenson plot device.

I often feel like I am in a cyberpunk novel. ;)
Interesting post. Perhaps a few other factors that affect this:

a) sector. consumer web is very different from medical devices or energy. Can't think of any drug or medical device companies that started without a IP portfolio.

a) east coast vs. west coast?

b) age / experience of the entrepreneurs, esp. if they've had any good exits in the past

I'm thinking of the local (Boston) entrepreneurs, who raised $x million from some big-name VC firm for their nth venture, after the first 2 had good exits. The risk profile is very different from that of a 20-something entrepreneur doing a consumer web idea.
Hi everyone,

I posted this in response to some other articles that have been posted to HN recently, such as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833767

I found that most articles tend to praise the media for publishing the leaked material, or condemn the people who leaked it, without really giving much further analysis.

Hope you guys find this interesting.
Shortly after I started a job, I noticed that we had large spikes in our traffic stats. Updates would be sent to customers for various pieces of data on a regular basis. They have previously implemented a simple form of incremental updates, but because of the way it was implemented, it would periodically have to send all of the data again. This was happening about once day.

The spikes were often enough to push the 95th percentile up to an absurd amount. I spent a few days making some changes to make all updates incremental and ended up saving the company about $50k/mo in bandwidth charges.
I think it depends on the individual situation/app. There are plenty who have startups on the side. That said, if your app is more heavily demanding user interaction/complicated then I think you are much more likely to find that customer service demands and/or technical issues post launch will exceed your part time availability.

An MVP tends to be just a small part of your vision. You test it out with some users and gather their feedback before progressing farther. If you cannot respond to them quickly I believe you will quickly find you have no users at all (good idea or not).
equally absurd
To reply to both: I simply reviewed their campaigns and adjusted settings to get them infront of their target audience.

Due to the generic nature of some of their keywords, the display network wasn't working for them, none of their users would find them on a mobile, and the timing of their visitors is very 9-5 to name a few of the changes I made.

These specific changes were simple, common sense Adwords settings that many users gloss over or do not address.

My biggest effect on the company was when I dove into their keywords, setup conversion tracking and adjusting the site for lead conversion. I doubled leads, halved conversion costs, etc.

I've since gone through their campaigns granularly and doubled their leads.
Definitely by design right now. We want to streamline the effort of applications, sites and developers to get access to our service. Feel free to use our contact form if you have other questions.
And as a reference device it was very useful for establishing what a pure Android device would be like. I'm hoping that eventually the Android UX will evolve to the point where customers won't tolerate the service providers and manufacturers gumming it up with novel interfaces.
Canadian health care has problems. Nothing is perfect. But don't confuse having problems with not being vastly superior to the US system.

My wife has her issues with the HCS here, but she's scared to death of the US system should we ever move there (being American myself). Their is a reason the guy behind Canada's health care system was made a national hero.
Having talked to quite a few girls with OKC accounts, and having seen their inboxes, this is surprisingly true. I didn't believe it until I saw it, but this is pretty much all of the major archetypes.
Ask HN: What's the best way for foreigners to incorporate in the States?
We're a design and development team with a company registered in Europe (Portugal). We have a product we've been selling worldwide (mainly to the US) for quite a while. We've had our problems with being non-US in the past, the main one being not having a merchant account and thus being impossible to signup for Authorize.net (or a similar service).

For the last couple of weeks we've been thinking about incorporating for different reasons: taxes and paperwork. We've been hearing about taxes and incorporating on Delaware, Texas, Nevada and the likes but we'd love to know what you guys on HN would suggest.

Where are your startups based? If in the US, what State? Where would you suggest us to register the company and where should I look into? We're looking for low taxes and almost no red tape, paperwork, invoice requirements, etc... We're developers and designers, we like to build awesome products ;)

We'd love to hear about not only taxing but also about monthly/quarterly/yearly paperwork one needs to fill in and submit on each example you guys know about.

Thanks for sharing. Feel free to link to any resources you know about.
Red Cross is a high overhead orginisation:

An American Red Cross statement was issued saying that 91 cents of every dollar donated specifically for the Hurricane Katrina disaster will go directly to disaster relief. This overhead of only <B>9%</B> is quite low for such a large organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross

Social Security is impressive because "the dministrative costs of the U.S. Social Security system are very low--<B>less than one percent of revenues.</B>" She claims this compares favorably with the overhead costs of the partly privatized Chilean system, which she says are "in the neighborhood of 15 percent of revenues." http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19085869.html
The Dark Side Of Entrepreneurship (Continued)
that's for the internet to decide
I don't know about the UK, but most software companies (unless they're populated by ex-googlers) in the US simply don't care if you have a degree as long as you can do the work.
Absolutely. At the time. But in retrospect I've learned to value them and even embrace them. It's become my speaking gig: http://vimeo.com/15455886
We're using erlang + python pretty heavily, so I'll throw that in here, since erlang wasn't on the list.
Sometimes it's timing (time of the day, time of the week). I like to give input on a lot of app reviews but I just don't always have the time to do so.

The problem I have with this giving my opinion on people's questions on your site is I don't know how much money they have, their annual income, what expenditures they have... I can't just tell people that they should buy a $1000 computer if I don't know if they have any debt, whether they have a computer already, or any other concerns. It's like asking a second opinion on a medical condition knowing only the symptom but not the medical history of the patient.

On the visual design, the colours are far too neon and need to be more mature. Plus, the text could use more white space and toned down in sizing.
Ask HN: Free beta or no free beta? MVP or wait for full release?
I'm nearing a ready-to-release state for a web app I've been working on, but this is my first startup and I'm not really sure how to proceed.

Should I offer a free beta period to build up a user base, or should I just go with a 30-day free trial and then start charging? Should I release a MVP (that I have ready now) or should I wait a few more weeks until the remaining features I have in mind are fleshed out?

I know this is a vague question, I guess what I'm really wondering is if there is an accepted procedure for initially releasing, or if The Right Thing varies greatly from company to company/niche to niche?

If it matters, the product is a time tracking/task tracking/invoicing app for freelancers, so needless to say, it's a very saturated market already.
I apologize in advance if it's spam, but I'm putting together two co-founders meetup in the coming weeks:

Silicon Valley on Nov 2nd: http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/calendar/148...

Austin on Dec 6th: http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Austin/calendar/15251144/

If your city is not listed, you know what to do :-)
I was going to comment but didn't. I will go do so now.
Thanks. I just might, next time I need to do file uploads... I've been really enamored with Sinatra as of late, and it seems like every side project I do needs file uploading...
In my personal opinion, true success is when you've achieved a level of success your happy with while also maintaining perhaps even strengthening your family relationship.

Was going to throw in "while keeping your sanity", but there are a few people who's loved ones already knew they were crazy to begin with ha-ha.
I have used nothing but some Dell Mini 9's for programming and everything else for over a year. It took some getting used to, and some significant customisation of my window manager, but I feel as productive with it as with anything previous.

The low specs rarely bother me. I have upgraded the SSD, that was the only stock component that was annoyingly slow (and small).

I wrote up the approaches I use for very task-specific, low resolution workspace layouts here:
http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbo...
Should be applicable to non-xmonad users too, just perhaps harder to do.
I'm a little surprised at the reaction here.

It's a service--like most other consumer subscription services--where if customers have to take action to keep their subscription going, you're more likely to lose those customers than if they only have to take action if they want to cancel.

My belief is that (1) when people's cards expire, many people don't bother to update their card information in every single place they have a subscription and (2) most people who want to cancel will actually cancel and not just count on their card's expiration date to do it for them. Since we've had just one complaint in more than a year (on the order of 0.1% of number of charges we've made on past-expiration cards), I think my beliefs are justified.

And charging for time spent writing email to or for a client and consulting on the phone sounds scummy to you?
Is a bluetooth mini-keyboard good enough?
Since the Geocities 1TB Reocities caught on here again the whole "Under Construction" meme got me thinking. It is kid of retro-cool. Really, is any other pre-launch page doing anything more? And isn't a "Beta" nothing more than an "Under Construction 2.0"?

Now, I wouldn't use any of those old graphics. I'd get something much more hip and modern. But the message could very well be the same. And toss in the lead capture and invite sign-ups to boot.
It's true that we each find ourselves in a context of public and private institutions and that (in addition to our own efforts) we owe our wealth to the existence of those institutions. It does not logically follow that our obligation to support government projects with taxes is unlimited. For example- Should people pay taxes to support the Judiciary? Should people pay taxes to subsidize corn farmers? We must be critical of public projects invented by government and parsimonious with our tax dollars. If we aren't then we will fall victim to every political group that says "we have a problem - and there ought to be a law to fix it."
If I interview Java programmers I always start with letting them write a method to reverse a String on the whiteboard. ~30% fail, for the others it's an easy warmup. I then ask how much memory this method consumes and if they could think of a better way to do it if this were C and not Java. This leads to the concept of immutability of Strings and you now can have a discussion on why the Java folks chose to make String immutable in the first place...
We am using LuaTeX (99.5% Lua, rest TeX) on our sole product.
"Leverage hundreds of our computers to power your programmable spreadsheets"

You don't have to give away how you run your company if you don't want to. So saying cloud or grid isn't necessary, even if it how you do it.

If you feel you must, why not just say you scale via Amazon web services so all data is secure, persistent/perpetual, and built on top of proven, robust architecture.
And your post is willfully ignorant of the fact that most of your taxes don't pay for the public goods you've listed. Roads, sewers, police and clean water are a ridiculously tiny fraction of what you pay in taxes. If you exclude waste in the military (and the other small ticket items you mention), it is even smaller.

Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.
I don't think much of two and a half men either, on the odd occasions I've caught some of it, but I really doubt that it could be fairly called "by far the worst show on TV".

Even if it were, I'd be wondering who has enough time to watch every show on TV in order to make such a judgement.
Dear sir,

Please send me your bank account deetz so I can spend some of our money.

kthx!
I really hope they don't end that sentence with "Steve Buscemi."

Also, my understanding is that using two condoms increases risk of breakage.
Never embarrassed. I use failed projects as a way to learn and improve on the process and next project.

Take what's worth saving and leave the rest: mistakes not to repeat, lessons worth learning, and view failures as learning experiences not as dead luggage following you.
A 70% CTR will most probably get you banned.
I'm not saying the UK's system is impossible. I'm saying it is staggeringly, almost criminally inefficient. I'm also not saying the current US system is better; we have our own set of regulations that have made our healthcare system as inefficient as any in the world.
> I base this on the wiliness of Tea Party members to run in republican primaries.

What primaries should they have run in?

It's much easier to take over a political party than to start one AND knock out one of the big two. Libertarians and greens have proved that.

It would have been absurd to run in democrat primaries.

Sharing some libertarian beliefs doesn't imply an obligation to join the LP, especially since the LP has repeatedly demonstrated that it's more interested in making a statement than actually getting elected and changing things.
No, it won't. The press doesn't care about random suing of small companies, because people don't care.

People like to read about a stunt, though.
paulsmith, the acid test is probably mobility. Do you think Carmack would still be a millionaire with a similar quality of life in a lower tax jurisdiction like Singapore? Probably he would. An even lower tax jurisdiction like Somalia? Probably not. Seasteading (www.seasteading.org) is an interesting experiment which can help us empirically find exactly where that "minimum necessary government" point is. Judging by the migration choices of many Chinese and Indian expats, for many people that promised land is no longer today's USA.
We've all (most?) lived the last couple of decades, but it seems that not all of us took our blinkers off.
These Are The Only 5 Countries Whose Pension Systems Can Survive
That is why I'm interested in it.
I find that I like the pure Android experience much better than Sense/Motoblur/etc.
Android Market boasts 100,000 app submissions
I've felt for years that school was run by those who were, when young, good at school. Its inbred and to a certain degree, pointless.

There was nowhere in my life more bounded by ceremony and tradition. And now that I'm out of it, and know for a certainty that precious little of it did me the slightest good, I recommend to all young people who will listen: "You are paying for schooling. Get out of it exactly what you find valuable, ignore the rest. An ounce of passion is worth oceans of rote work"
Do you mean the one you posted 1 hour ago? Without a clickable link?

Firstly, your timing sucks. Anything submitted about now only gets on the "new" page for about 40 minutes.

Secondly, your title isn't very catchy.

Thirdly, the description you give doesn't really encourage me to check it out, which coupled with no clickable link means I'm not going to bother.

Having been here well over two years, I'm a little surprised you don't already know these things.
why do you need to implement two solutions if sprites is OK for this case? data url is great in some cases, for example generate images on client side but imho css sprites are optimal there.