skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I probably have a different perspective on this than a lot of the Americans having lived my whole life in the UK until a couple of years ago when I moved out to San Francisco.

I think my issue with this essay, and a lot of the politics I hear in America, is that two separate issues are conflated. Those issues are whether government should regulate an industry/practice/area of life (regulation) vs. if government should provide services in that industry/practice/area of life (services).

There are many places where the government in the US provides both these roles, for example the financial space. For example, the Fed provides a government run service in the finance space which to provides services which are both used by private enterprise but also competes with them. In the same space the government also provide regulations and guidelines which (supposedly) protect the public interest to temper the raw self-interest of the market.

When people talk about government inefficiency they generally mean that government is doing a poor job of running their services. However there also many examples of extremely popular government services, such as Medicare.

The question in my mind is less about discouraging government from being in a space, but what the balance of government regulation vs. services is. A good example of this is health care. As the US moves towards providing universal healthcare there are a couple of different models can be looked at from various countries. From the UK we have a huge government run service, the NHS, which provides our healthcare. In Germany they have a strong regulatory solution in which the government mandates the criteria in which private healthy insurance companies must operate, as well as mandating insurance.

I don't think many people would argue against the need for some centralised government (either at the state or federal level) that protects the commons, and the rights of man. What I would like to see more of is arguments about how we implements those rights.

A good example of a debate we should have is this part of the healthcare one. The highly distributed healthcare in the US (for those with insurance) means that electronic mostly medical records don't exist or aren't shared amongst providers. In a centralised government run bureaucracy (or a private bureaucracy like Kaiser) electronic records are much more possible. Kaiser in-fact, demonstrated massive efficiency gains through their electronic records system. It doesn't mean that electronic medical records couldn't be provided through a regulatory mandate, but in order to have that discussion we have to get past the "big government" vs. "little government" and decide what we want our government to do for us and if it should do that by services or by regulation.
If I remember the story correctly, if the cafe didn't go lower than 50% on the deal itself, then Groupon would take 100% of the money it generated.

Edit:I found the link.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=443354298928&id...

When the customer pays less than $10, Groupon takes 100%.
great idea. will you guys be doing one of these in the facebook dublin office soon?
> "this is the kind of evasive, hand-wavey crap that I'm talking about."

It's evasive and hand-wavey because you don't know what an economics term means and didn't take 30 seconds to look it up on google or wikipedia? I expect better from everyone on HN.

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

Something is a private good if:

- it can be distributed individually (that is, you can allow only those who've paid for it or registered for it to use it)

- its use/consumption by one party precludes its use by another party

Roadways can probably be categorized as a "club good" -- they can be used by multiple people, but it's possible to make them available only to "paying customers". Toll roads are a club good for those who pay the toll, while other roads are a club good for all registered/licensed motorists.

To be a truly "public good" it needs to be impossible to exclude non-payers; things like clean air or military protection are public goods.

Externalities are not goods; they are costs or benefits associated with goods but incurred by outside parties.
Working for defence companies
has anyone come accross posts within HN or else where that talked about questions asked when facing interview's for defence companies .
i recently read a post in HN who had given valuable insights on how to handle interview's willing to work for defence contractors(but couldn't find it)
My site isn't up yet, but I would use this service, and be willing to pay for it as well.

If you are an expert in this domain, maybe you could have a cheap automated testing suite, and then offer a consulting service to help fix the security issues.
A childhood friend who had gone to Harvard invited me to hang out with some Harvard grads in SF two weeks ago. It was strange--as an outsider--to listen to their college stories; they would talk about how they'd drive down to Yale and scream "Harvard, Harvard!" and it was then, I realized, how little I had in common with these grads.

I tried to talk to one of the Harvard grads, and asked him what he was doing. Apparently he's working at the Sierra Club, and from his job description, his role amounted to essentially a receptionist. And from talking to him, he seemed disillusioned that his degree didn't offer him all the benefits that he believed he was entitled.

The Harvard elitism that come out a bit, if not intentionally. My friend was trying to help out the bloke who couldn't understand why he couldn't get a decent paying job as a Harvard grad, and was telling him to do lucrative tutoring jobs. He coached, "You're a Harvard grad! Parents will fork a lot of money to have a Harvard grad tutor their kids, hoping that their kids can also attend Harvard!"

Maybe I'm oversensitive as an outsider, but I didn't feel much warmth or feel that these Harvard educated fellows were very interested in talking to me. And maybe they're blessed to have such camaraderie. After all, I am just one who went to Arizona State/AFROTC with a vocational degree in CSE instead of a liberal arts education.

It's not difficult for me to talk to grads of schools from "regular" institutions, such as UCLA, Berkeley, USC, UC Irvine, et al, even with a liberal arts education. But when trying to talk to grads of an "elite education," I have found it considerably more awkward, and struggle to level common ground. Usually it ends up in a lack of interest by both parties to talk to each other, or smalltalk, waiting for the first opportunity to escape from discomfort such as a convenient phone call or errand to run.

It's possible that this is just a typical case of in-group vs. out-group happening, but I've never found myself so lost at words that I pretty much conversed smalltalk the entire time.
One way you can get around going to the US is if one of you is a US citizen. I discovered that US citizens can open a bank of america business accounts online. But it probably doesn't help you guys too much.
I've been using FeedBurner for years and am "sorta" locked in and the main value for me has been the value others place in the subscriber counts. No matter how many pageviews I can demonstrate I get, the (inaccurate) subscriber count given by the official FeedBurner widget is a massive driver for my ad sales (which is odd, since the ads go on the site, not in the feed).
There is no need for differentiation when serving up bits and bytes. There is a need for competition on quality of service, customer support and pricing.

EDIT: Clarification, I'm referring to the carriers. The manufacturers need differentiation, but would be better served doing so through hardware.
With CTR of 1.5% and 245 visitors, it looks like you are making $0.5 per click. Is it true? It seems to me it's ridiculously high price, or at leaast not sustainable in the long term, isn't it?

I'm learning web programming, trying to start up little sites. Please leave me your email or drop a line: nleschov at gmail
Big, boxy datacenters would probably benefit from carpeting their roofs with this stuff.
About universal health care, go to France sometimes.
Ahh, gotcha. That makes more sense. =)

But even still, I think they have a big leg up here. Imagine being a Flash developer, and Flash suddenly supporting HTML5. You can take what you've learned and leverage it against new tech. Instead of Flash authoring tools just authoring for Flash, now they can support all these cool open standards.

If anything, that's a great justification for using Adobe products.
I don't necessarily disagree, but would you mind explaining your reasoning behind that?
Launch of Mint Data is big fricking news.
The Danger of Following Your Dreams
I was asking myself a similar question - do people want out of debt bad enough to cut spending?

Even if the answer is no, you can still make money from people's desires. Gyms are the best example - they sell access, but it's up to you to use it. For most people the sad truth is that the gyms end up taking money for nothing, and customers keep paying because of their own idealism. ReadyForZero, whether or not they like this idea, could profit in a similar way.
I am a user, and love Flipboard.

How do you monetize it? I would have willingly paid for it.
I'd suggest using paypal gifts since its the easiest and most common form of online payment transfer that everyone uses. Even though i truly hate paypal, it usually is the option thats the easiest to implement. I sent you an email begging for some decal help!

btw your designs rock. =D
I didn't (in fact, have an upvote), but although many are not liable for income tax most people pay some kind of tax - sales tax, or payroll tax, or state tax.

You are right to point out that a good chunk of the population will make a net gain, but many of them will only do so because they're very poor. Some poor people are lazy, but it doesn't follow that all poor people are freeloaders. Unfortunately, less honest people than you have made a lot of spin out of those statistics, for a variety of political ends.
MintData Shows Real-Time Spending Trends for U.S. Cities and Merchants
On the one hand, you could use some new skills managing perceptions at the office -- to move up significantly in the programming profession, you're going to have to lead people down the path of understanding both how valuable you are, and also how difficult what you do is.

Many engineers aren't good at this.

But, I echo almost everyone here who thinks you're in a toxic situation -- you should get out; so much of your perception of what's normal and reasonable in a work situation is being formed in your horrible, horrible one that it's hard to keep your head straight. Nothing is likely to fix this for you, and getting some new job skills to allow you to keep working in this place isn't a good option for your emotional health.

A low risk situation for you would be to find some contracting work, then give notice, given what you've said, I'd suggest you give notice first to the boss's dad, explaining the situation. If you can't do that in person, at least write a polite note explaining:

I like you guys, but the market is offering quadruple your pay rates right now, and the work environment is not enticing enough to make me want to stay. Best regards, blah. Do this to minimize badmouthing effects by your now-jilted boss; it won't solve everything, but it's worth going over his head in a situation like this. Don't knock him, just explain that you can make X and Y with double the vacation, better benefits, and etc. etc. elsewhere.

After notice is given, and you've started at least one other gig (<<<<---- Important to build confidence and reset 'normal' in your head), accept contracting work they offer you with the following rules: at least triple, no, make that quadruple your current hourly rates, and you choose the location, that is, you come in for meetings and delivery, and do the rest from wherever you like.

In situations like this, it's not unlikely you'd get a call when you leave -- they sound seriously unappreciative of the work you're punching out, and hopefully the market will teach them that in short order on your leavetaking.

In any event, leave as fast as you can -- you might be surprised how differently you feel about yourself and the world once you've made the jump.
PHP session_regenerate_id(true)

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-regenerate-id....
Wow. Weird that I've never accidentally triggered this; I'm a vim user.

Another nice, "hidden" feature:

CMD+SHIFT+G when in Finder opens a dialog in which you can manually enter a path with tab-completion. Also works in dialogs when opening/saving files.
Absolutely. In fact, I think you can extrapolate this to many other things. We've become so accustomed to the idea of the future that we're not noticing the fact that we've well entered it.

XKCD regularly features this as a topic so I'm surely not alone with this feeling. I mean, we have a world-spanning information network that contains just about every bit of knowledge we can think of. We build devices the size of a thumb that can calculate more in a second than a thousand people could in a lifetime. We control these devices by touching a thin display that can show millions of different colors spread over a surface comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots.

All of these things were science fiction thirty years ago. Some of them were fifteen years ago. These are interesting times!

But somehow, the democratization of science fiction has made people numb to this realization :-)
Coming from a country with a "socialist" healthcare I was very surprised by how much money I'm paying in the US for health insurance, it's more than what I was paying in taxes and when I actually want to use my health insurance I still have to pay considerable additional money to actually get the serivice.
And it's also extremely inefficient, there is no reason to measure my weight, temperature, blood pressure and breathing if what I have is clearly tendonitis.

Long story short: I think your health care market got you the worst possible solution to health care in the world.
1.5% is really not bad at all! How much traffic do you get per day?

I'd change the URL structure from numeric to keyword bases (happy to help with apache config if you like).

I'd also provide a search box, powered by google search so you can still get ad clicks. Add an addthis.com button to each page to build backlinks and virality.
Happy to do it! This is the question I've gotten most. It's probably worth a future blog post, but I'll give you the short answer I've been giving others so far. The best thing is word of mouth. Once you have some happy clients, they will tell others. Mention to friends and other developers that you know that you're looking for contract work, and they will very often pass your name along to people. Sell your own apps, sometimes people will find them, contact you and ask you to do stuff that is similar. Finally, give boards like Elance a shot, but don't sell yourself short and take $15/hr jobs if you can't live on that.

As for your second question, I'm never 100% comfortable about this, which is kind of fun. I never know what someone is going to ask me to do next, but the API docs are good, the community is helpful and it's a fun platform to work on. There's lots of answers out there if you need them. However, I can tell you there are important things to know. For one, memory management is vital on iOS devices. The OS can and will remorselessly kill your app for using too much, without warning. Memory overuse is a crashing bug, do whatever you must to squash it dead.
Link please ComputerGuru?
Spot on. I missed the 2 part, which makes this question much more interesting. By the way, I think I do could it in one drop; drop one from floor 1. If it breaks the answer is 0, else 1 because I don't think many eggs could survive a two story drop.
So far the closest I've found is HTC Droid Incredible: thin, no keyboard, responsive touchscreen, quality camera (don't have an iPhone 4 so can't compare), accurate GPS (saved my ass in a ghetto) and easily rootable (maybe? I've heard its not hard, but haven't felt the need to).
Well, you've kinda missed the point. The point is that this isn't a deserted island. It's a carefully structured system, one purpose of which is to give individuals the foundation to be as successful and innovative as Carmack has.
I work in an HPC facility. We are all a bit skeptical of LINPACK running on a hybrid system.

LINPACK in general is an interesting benchmark. We recently bought a new cluster. We were faced with an interesting decision. Get 4,000 cores with Infiniband, giving us a spot on the top500 list (We've been on there for the past 5 years) or get a 6,000 cores with gigabit ethernet, losing our spot on the top500. (We get %90 of our theoretical max over infiniband. Gigabit drops that down to 50%). We did a survey among our users and very few of them ran multinode jobs. Most used 8 or 12 threads, which runs fine on a dual socket hex core westmere. So we dropped infiniband. So even though we technically have a slower cluster than we could have had, we have more efficient utilization and are able to offer our users more resources.

Since very few comercial applications can currently take advantage of a hybrid system, it seems to me this cluster was built with the top500 in mind, rather than being efficiently used. As far as useful results, I wouldn't be surprised if it only accomplished 2 or 3 times what we do, and we're a 10,000 core shop that probably won't be on the next top500.
hammering things out on your own is great. That’s almost an entirely different class of learning, and it works well in the majority of cases.

I am deliberately taking this para out of context to point out how learning by "hammering things out" is something to be discouraged highly, especially to the young professionals. Sure, Advance work require breakthrough, but it cannot happen, unless you know/read/learn from your peers, in any field of work. Future of any field, is always based on the shoulders of the past work.
I'd really like to see a before/after gallery. Or maybe it could be shown graphically as a convergence of data points somehow?
Well, in most cases where there is socialized medicine, doctors decide on need, and groups of doctors decide on standards.

politicians play no role.
Contracts do not solve problems. In a few cases they reduce problems because the parties can clearly see what they agreed upon, but that's it. Picking the right person and interacting well with them solves problems.

Having a 90-page ironclad 6-point-font contract will do absolutely nothing for you with a $500 deal. Having the right person on the other end of the deal and a handshake agreement will be just as good.

Look at it this way: even if you had a 90-page ironclad contract THIS TIME AROUND, it still wouldn't be worth trying to enforce it in court. You would be in the exact same situation you are now. The contract is not the problem, nor is it the solution to the problem.
I've used legalzoom to setup a Nevada LLC.
Easy and cheap.
Offer HN: Room in Upper East Side, NYC
I can offer someone place to stay in Upper East Side, NYC.

I live with three other people and we all have our own rooms, but we have a giant fricken living room that’s not being used with a balcony. If anyone needs a place for a day or two, you can always “cop a squat” lol.

* 15 min walk to the subway on the 6 train line

NYC is NYC, so enough said. =)
In this age of clustered, load-balanced, plain-old-computers in racks, who cares about a "supercomputer"?

I'm sure Google could claim to have the largest "computer" if they wanted to, or if the definition of "supercomputer" were stretched a bit.
I was thinking about paypal, but the part I don't feel comfortable with is asking for money. It might have to do - we'll see what kind of response this gets.

Glad you like the designs!
Apriori (that is, without knowledge of the results) communism was way less crazy-sounding that some here tend to think, because look how many smart people it attracted! Look at 60's US or at Russia circa 1900, where communism was the belief system for smart young people to "graduate" to. It had the same hipster vibe as the belief in a benevolent singularity today, only more so.
I would enjoy this, but I don't have any particular reason to meet with you guys. Are you looking mainly for people who are interested in photos?
Wow, this is something :) - As noted in the comments it might have been from a student
Not sure exactly what you guys are building, but I hope it makes a fat dent in how credit bureaus work. I went through my first credit report from the 3 credit bureaus. Not only was the process archaic, but along the way I was bombarded by all kinds of predatory offers to sign up for paid credit monitoring services. After I retrieved my reports, I find inaccurate information, along with an account that I've never seen before labeled as an "adverse account". On top of that, I see misreported addresses and dates as well. From there, I had to do 3 separate dispute claims (all of them slightly different in process, but equally filled with spam). While on the phone with an Indian call center with Equifax, I was cut short every time I asked a question or tried to clarify, and at the end of the call I get yet another pitch to sign up for their paid credit monitoring service.

Please tear down and rebuild these sloppy and fat credit bureaus. At the very least, I hope you guys provide some solid competition for them to shape themselves up.
Old video from Linus
seconded ..
Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law
Too bad I'm over in the East Coast. Would love to have met you all! Have a great time.
people below the poverty line in the US consume extremely low quality food. And most wouldn't even have that if it weren't for government food stamps.
"hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the formation of galaxies"

Yeah, I only use bittorrent to download linux distros as well.
Django Class-based Generic Views in v1.3
Class-based views represent a huge advance in really simplifying what goes into getting a lot of data quickly to the end-user. Check out the updated documentation; this is really much easier to wrap your head around if you're new to the framework and goes a long way I think in facilitating cleaner (and DRY-er) code.

The inclusion of this feature is the result of a ticket filed three years ago. The 1.3 release of Django promises to be awesome. The strength of this release is not so much new features, but closing out a host of bugs and other aging tickets like this one. This is really a great step in the right direction for Django overall.
If the team feels like making a trip to Champaign, IL then sign me up!
Users Always Scan for Value First
To answer the question outright, yes. Popular topic these days on HN. I am a 29 year-old female founder expecting my first child soon, based in Tokyo and I applied to YC recently.

I have been blessed with an incredible support system. My husband and I both worked hard and saved over the last four years, my technical co-founder is an experienced parent of two in his 40s, the community here in Tokyo has been unbelievably supportive and, not to mention my family and close friends who are all aware of my YC application and have agreed to help us in both relocating to the valley and helping us on a rotating schedule to support us and help with our baby, if we are indeed selected.

We have the resources and the support, as Jason has suggested is most critical. I personally think this is a perfect time for me to pursue my start-up, especially in Japan. Women in the workplace and policies here are still significantly behind those in the US.

I've always taken huge risks and gone after what I wanted. This is no exception.

http://takara.posterous.com/resigned-from-my-job-having-a-ba...