skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Voting in an Echo Chamber: The Myth of the “Informed” Vote
Anyone have a sense of who the market is for cloud-based 3D rendering? It seems like even for a small-to-medium-sized shop it's likely to be worthwhile to have a pretty solid baseline capacity in house...
Guide to the Helsinki, Finland Startup Community
Kenny and Zuke's - The best reuben you will ever have. They make their own pastrami. About 2 blocks from Powell's. http://www.kennyandzukes.com/
Washing machine example in Forth
In Australia, the biggest carrier Telstra generally adds a tonne of crapware, and several people I know with htc desires have links to various telstra features that are broken on the default firmware. I seem to recall the reason telstra didnt get into the iphone game until significantly after the other carriers was because of the iphone impeding sales of telstra 'services'.

We also have the more budget oriented virgin mobile who have generally little to no customization depending on the phone.
I don't see anywhere in his comment where he claims that there are enough resources to give high quality health care to everyone. He states that the distribution should shift from a "who can pay" based mechanism to a "who needs it the most" based mechanism.

Yes, as you mentioned, you would certainly see more wealthier individuals that would be denied care. You would also see more poor people getting care they desperately need.

>That's the debate: Is it possible to give high quality health care to everyone?

I don't think this is really the debate. I think the debate is whether or not health care should be portioned out based on how much money someone is willing to/able to spend or based on how badly somebody needs the treatment. Personally, I think that's the only moral way it can be done.
I don't think it's just a function of time. 3-5 questions could easily take 30 minutes to answer. A phone call is just such a larger imposition than email (for many). No time to think a solid response through, research your answer, start after supper finish after the kids are asleep, etc.

Email lets the respondent control the conversation, rather than the requestor.
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>>The point of the law is "attrition through enforcement"

It is much more than that.

If you're a US citizen and you're not carrying proof of citizenship, you could get thrown in jail for not having your "papers".

Now, I'm sure many citizens feel that their accent or their skin color or some other attribute protects them from sent to jail and that they don't need to carry their papers with them. However, if a cop thinks that you might be a Canadian, they could throw you in jail for not proving otherwise. .
...which is next to Stumptown...which is next to Ace Hotel...which is next to Clyde Common. Man, what a block.
I have a MSI Wind. The keyboard is a pain to do dev work with. if you're doing Android development with a netbook get a real device to test - the emulator is practically unusable.

Agree with the rest of the comments here, a regular cheap notebook with a better processor will fill the role much better.
Sorry, my bad. I added the keg-only dependency libiconv. Is it working for you now?
Ask HN: How do you visualize code in your head?
I just realized something a little weird. When I think about code, I see the code itself. I picture the text, line breaks, the structure of the file, etc.

What about you? Do you see colors? Shapes? Objects? Do things move or is the picture static?
If I have a merchant account, do I also need a checking account?
Or can I deposit, get a debit/check card, and write checks from a merchant account?
Quite right you are. I still take some issue with the idea that 75% of the poor don't want to work. The report is not entirely clear on what it means to be "looking for work", and it's hard to know what different motivations are driving that 10% of the american population. But, absent data, I will concede the point.
Both the fridge and the roof are problems which are moderately expensive for low-income people to fix immediately, but which grow into more expensive problems if you ignore them. It's easy to see how the roof will be more of a problem in a few months than when you first noticed it leaking, but not having a working fridge means you can't buy food that requires a refrigerator as cheaply. Not only is it more expensive to buy smaller quantities, but you then have to visit the store more often, which uses more gas, etc. Someone on a budget is probably only grocery shopping once or twice a month, since the best deals are in bulk, but not having a place to store cold food removes that option.
I just found zenbe lists after so much extensive searching that I considered coding my own. I make lists of things, but not todo lists, just lists of books to read, things to code, music to buy, things to do before releasing a version etc. So I didn't like all the list apps that forced the todo aspect. Zenbe lists didn't though, and it works nice on my iPhone, which is also a plus/
I don't think it's 'irritating' or 'obnoxious'. I think the word is 'unethical'. Coercing people into giving their time or money is morally and ethically reprehensible.

I will -never- give money to any organization that does this, and I will loudly tell anyone else around about it as well.

I've seen these organizations force people into giving money when they can't afford to go without it themselves. Worse than failing to help, they are actively harming people. Whenever I see it, I make sure to let the person know that they do -not- have to give and they would be fools not to go withdraw their pledge.
Count the World: Valuable CPU cycles wasted for your entertainment
Doesn't seem like they are actually using Azure for their films. The article says this was a proof of concept.
It's kind of a showcase of Japanese culture: food (included in ticket price) (reputed to be good bentos, unfortunately as I am involved I won't get any), dance, fashion, music. I haven't been before, but it's a popular event (~400-500 people) and I've been to the annual Luau put on by the Pacific Islanders club (which is a similar event) and it was a blast. Tickets should be available through the PSU box office, though I don't have better details with me.

The JSS (student club putting on the event) has a lot of Japanese exchange students as well as anyone interested in Japanese culture, and has "contribute to world peace" in the mission statement. (I also saw "we are not the anime club" in some of the literature they had, if that gives you a better idea of what the club is about, and what kind of event they'd put on.)
Another great quote by PG:

When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.

From "What would you do with FU money" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511104
similar situation here. except i picked Common LISP.

for a couple of reasons: speed of your app; SLIME is great; more documentation (books); a long history :)
Saturday Market: http://www.portlandsaturdaymarket.com/
Good stuff to browse and buy.
"For the foreseeable future"? I foresee a future where windows as we know it is obsolete, even in the office, and MS's future as a whole is in doubt.

iOS and Android don't look like Windows killers today, and they aren't. But they are harbingers of things to come. In 1975 the MITS Altair didn't look like a mainframe / mini-computer killer, and it wasn't. In a mere 10 years since the Altair (a toy computer) hit the shelves the entire industry had been overturned, and mainframes/mini-computers were dying out while micro-computers came to the fore. Micro-computers grew up a lot in that time frame, but the essential elements of their superiority were there from the beginning (simpler, cheaper, more mass-production friendly, performance tied to components not overall construction, faster/cheaper innovation loop, etc.)

The same is true for mobile OSes and for web-apps. They have a lot of growing up still to do to compete with Windows everywhere, but the core is still there, and they have far less to grow than the Altair did. In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be the iPad, iOS, android tablets and phones, and their native apps etc? In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be webapps? In 10 years a VPS (or equivalent "cloud" instance) with hundreds of gigs of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage and the CPU power to match will probably cost the equivalent of $20 a month in today's dollars. Add to that powerful new technologies like web sockets and all the other html5 technologies, along with new things we haven't even imagined yet. In 10 years gmail will be nearly 3x as old as it is today, imagine the innovations that will happen in that time.

And I'm supposed to imagine that somehow there's no chance that Windows will lose its footing amidst all this innovation? Perhaps it won't, but I can't predict the future, and from what I see it looks like there are huge very real risks to Microsoft's cash cow.
Hey come hang out at PIE. There are bunch of startups that are working there (UrbanAirship, Mugasha and Bank Simple) send me an email if you want to drop by.
Sorry, I'm not a hacker, I wouldn't know the first thing about setting up an interface to a hard drive. However, the first thing that pops out at me is that you just described a 512 GB addressing scheme. You want half your disk to be unaddressable?
Electrolux EL1014A ErgoRapido Bagless Cordless Handheld/Stick Vacuum Cleaner
That sounds like an interesting story that I'd like to read, any links? Google's not being helpful.
So we appear to be in blurry-definitionland. Meals for prisoners are private goods which are part of the public good "functional criminal justice system". Welfare checks for unemployed bums are private goods which are part of the public good "no dead hobos on lawns".
Who is this "industry" you speak of and why are you limited to what it dictates you use?

But seriously, I know what you mean. Certain, enterprisey shops will always prefer things like Java because they have this perception that it's a "save" language because it is established, meaning they'll always be able to find someone to bang on their Java code. These places, in terms of the technology they use, are largely uninteresting in this context, however. If something comes along and is better, start using it and spreading the word, and help lessen the influence of the legacy on new projects. Eventually Java, etc programmers will be in high demand to maintain old, legacy projects and to help fix the Y2.1K bug or something of the sort.
Resident here: this is a great list, except I would not bother with the Rose Garden this time of year (kind of boring outside of May-July when flowers aren't in bloom), and instead would hit up the Japanese Garden (just next door), or Chinese Gardens downtown.
> they can't afford to "experiment" with cooking, because if their children don't want to eat what they make when experimenting then the children are going to go hungry.

This strikes me as a very first world kind of problem (assuming the meal is still edible). See also: http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-am-so-starving-vs-i-am-so...
Startup-Loans like Student Loans
I was thinking why there isn't a place like Sallie Mae for Start-ups. Sallie Mae will pay out thousands of dollars for people to go to school who may or may not be successful why not do it for someone starting their own company or with a Great Idea?

I don't find the SBA to be for Start-ups or Entrepreneurs or Ramen Profitable Companies.

Any thoughts?
Gallery Zero (34th & Burnside; www.thegalleryzero.com). Big show 11/5 (free beer/wine).
i rsvp'd a yes.
The culture's been suffering malaise for years. Even back in 2005 all the executives acknowledged the problem (I had a great 1-1 with Ballmer about it) but it's very difficult to actually change anything. So a lot of talented and passionate people there are frustrated, burnt out, or looking elsewhere. Windows and Office have the power at the top (since after all they contribute the bulk of the revenue and profits) which creates huge inertia and makes the company as a whole very backward looking.

Of course, it's not to late to recover: they've got huge assets, and Windows and Office have a few more years to run. But so far the progress hasn't been anywhere near what's needed ...
I run a service based business (computer repair) and that's exactly what I was thinking - I can offer a 50% discount and it's still almost all profit. But I wonder if this is us only or works in other countries (must check), and how many people in my town of 8000 have ever heard of groupon.
Yeah, but as a new customer how do I access the cheaper plans? They're not on the rates page.
Extreme Programming lessons learned
Responding to Customer Criticisms On Line
Ah, this might be bad news for http://smokescreen.us

I've been watching them hopefully for a couple months, and it's been looking pretty good (see the demo of Strongbad in js here: http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html ), but unless they end up with a better product than the code Adobe rolls out, their program will probably get little use. If it wasn't supposed to be open source, I could suggest he sell it to people with noncurrent versions of CS who didn't want to upgrade, but just wanted the HTML5 export feature.
+1 for the Japanese Garden, which was awesome. I need to go back to Portland just to see that again.
Fermilab is Building a 'Holometer' to Determine Whether Reality Is an Illusion
> I'd be wondering who has enough time to watch every show

You're right; it was hyperbole. But given my sample size I'm comfortable saying it's among the worst. It's a safe bet that an episode will contain at least one hooker, penis or poop joke. The characters are only barely developed - you can pretty easily describe each one in a few words.

Lorre has made some decent shows. I just find it depressing that 2.5 Men caters to the very lowest sense of humor and that it is so successful at it.
6 Books to Inspire Creativity in Programmers
If you want more tech conversations, there's NoPoCoNi every Monday night at the new(ish) Lucky Lab on N Killingsworth.

http://twitter.com/nopoconi
Ask HN: Commercial viability testing?
Dear HN,

I'm working on a web based service that helps make purchase decisions. The service can potentially apply to any kind of purchase (ex. car, electronics, wine, etc). However I'd like to know its commercial viability of before I do too much work.

So I've been thinking a lot about how to validate this idea. Friends get excited about it, but that's expected. I rejected surveys because of the biases involved (randoms expressing interest != real customers buying).

My current approach is to try the idea in a small market (say, digital pianos) with a barely working prototype, just to test interest and conversion. So I've picked an SEO friendly market. Now I'm nearly finished on a minimally-functional MVP. My plan is to do some traditional (white hat) SEO stuff to get some traffic flow, and then test some hypotheses on these real organic users to decide whether or not to proceed.

I'm curious what people from the HN community have to say about this approach, since it would probably involve me paying someone for SEO. Am I way off base or does the approach make sense?
Beautiful women (or men) and traveling all over the world. You can look forward to living to full spectrum of human experiences with no financial hassle. Not too shabby
I'll disagree.

The features you listed apply to other languages much better than they do to English (except the bit about influential countries.) Chinese has a richer vocabulary, is more succinct and has a much less sophisticated grammatic system than English. If you want to get rid of the daunting logosyllabic way of writing, go Korean. Almost the same advantages, with one of the most beautiful and simple alphabets in the world. If you want an even easier language, Bhasa (Indonesian) is probably your choice. Don't forget there's Esperanto, too. Arguably much better suited as a 'world' (or at least pan-Euro-American) language.

In fact, English sucks as a `common' language from a lot of perspectives: it's got a very peculiar grammar. In fact, linguists concentrating their efforts on English has crippled a lot of research, and people are realizing (have been for a while, outside of the Anglo-Saxon area) that the paradigms that worked for English are pretty misplaced for other languages.

English is an almost isolating language with a lot of inflection-based traits, a weird and very specific tense system, remnants of case that confuse the hell out of people, a fiendishly difficult preposition-system to replace case (including weirdness such as preposition stranding and long-distance dependencies,) very rich and productive idiomatic mechanisms and one roller coaster of an orthography (mostly due to its uncompromisingly inconsistent way of adoption of vocabulary.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on English. All languages are beautiful (except Volapük.) I'm just sick and tired of people with, very often, little to no linguistic authority making claims about the language's viability or suitability to be a language spoken world wide. As a linguist, you hear that all the time, and you just get tired of it :-(

The only bit that matters - the reason I (an expat from an ex-socialist country living in western Europe, but not England) am talking to you over the Internet in English - is the cultural (and primarily militaristic!) dominance of the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants (i.e. Britain, America, Australia.) In fact, it's probably mostly due to Britain's vast empire in post-medieval times.
I'd love to. Just emailed.
How far away are the local Portland crags? I'm a climber as well and have been thinking about moving to Portland. I know Smith Rocks is a few hours away. Is there anything closer? I boulder and do trad and sport climbing.
And I was expecting an article about how in any transaction or relationship with a power differential it is the less powerful (smaller) party who makes the first request.
I'm embarrassed by the code I wrote last week.
The poll options remind me of a badly written switch statement. Not only are the options overlapping to different degrees, but they're time-sensitive. Say I just broke up with someone from OkCupid. My answers would be different today than yesterday, even though the significant fact that OkCupid led to a relationship is unchanged. How about more humanized poll options:

a. OkCupid worked for me

b. OkCupid hasn't worked for me yet

c. I've never used OkCupid

At the moment, these poll results are useless. The poll tries to infer too much about general online dating instead of answering the real question: does the most popular free online dating service, OkCupid, work for HN readers? That's enough to investigate through one poll.
The headline is very misleading, they aren't using it at all. It was a proof of concept only.
I made a guess at the url based on how they format their live urls. I guess this could be one negative of having nice urls.

The current signup urls are:

Maximum: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Max/signup/new

Premium: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Premium/signup/new

Plus: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Plus/signup/new

Old Plans:

Basic: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Basic/signup/new

Free: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Free/signup/new
WTF seriously
OK so I have asked people to rate my startup(twice) and then to give me advice (good or bad) about another software idea and I get a grand total of 2 comments and 2 upvotes for 3 submissions. Then some guy, who just happens to be YC whatever asks where to go in Portland and he practically gets voted the most interesting person alive (37 points and 55 comments as of now). Are you freaking kidding me? When I started here I thought it was (mostly) about coding and startups where people could get feedback from their peers. Now it seems more like a place for YC guys to post about their fabulous experiences. I wouldn't even care if everybody said my ideas were terrible. At least that would be feedback.
Disappointed.
Private prisons are an abomination and should not exist.
I've long been considering putting together a directory of projects whose code is fantastic for learning from. There's just too much code out there, and it would be nice to see lists of "great iPhone code to learn from", "effective and architecturally sound Ruby on Rails projects that scale", etc. This would really require some assistance from the community, but long term I think it would highlight code from quality hackers, and improve the status quo of programmers out there.

Any such thing already exist?
Mine is http://wikitorrents.org/ .
It's goal is to be the internet's largest collection of user-created pages of downloadable videos.
It's a work-in-progress.

Tell me everything that's wrong with it.

Patrick Keys
citizenkeys@gmail.com
The detail screen is what I really need help with specifically. I could send you screenshots of the current state of the app (as the website is not reflecting this properly, they are about 6 months old). My biggest challenge has been presenting that one screen in an effective manner to end users.
FROM useless compsci undergrad TO web app developer: how do I get started?
A few years ago, I could do basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript but didn't really get into web design. Fast forward to now and I'm in my second year of uni doing computer science and can handle, C, C++, Java, Standard ML (yes...). I've also done quite a lot on the algorithms/data structure side.

I want to make web apps that are clean, fast and fun. I want to do this by myself. I'm not ready for anything more yet (obviously) but I have a view to making some serious stuff one day, so I don't want to learn some toy language.

I'm struggling with analysis paralysis. What should I immerse myself in? What are the guides I need? I'm happy to use multiple guides and real-world examples to learn Python, JavaScript, Ruby, whatever - I just need a starting point and a plan.

Otherwise I'll waste time.

Can anyone help?
I would be interested in the following:

- does it have to be a laptop? what if there is a WiFi router in my room?

- does the device needs to be on my lap? is it safe to have it on the table?

- does it only make the sperms less mobile or does it corrupt the DNA?
Another Heinlein quote (from Starship Troopers): "Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that. Nothing More."
Wi-Fi Potential Health Risks
Typical degradation rates for crystalline silicon solar panels is 0.5% per year. When you read about efficiency being an area of innovation it's conversion of solar radiation into electricity that's usually the issue. Inverters are 95% efficient (the other 5% goes off as heat) but there is R&D going on to improve this. The other innovation is micro-inverters - meaning each panel has it's own inverter. This means that a panel that is shaded only loses production from that panel. In a central inverter system, partial shading can kill production for the entire string - meaning all panels connected to that inverter. The tradeoff for micro inverters is higher expense and some would say more maintenance and points of failure, although there are counter arguments I won't bore you with.
Unfair comparison with Yahoo. Microsoft does a ton of things well and they've done a bang-up job with many of their recent products.

I'd say they've already started to successfully turn the ship around.
My friend made the ULTIMATE Colbert Rally shirt, & he plans on open-sourcing it.
They also mention that Pixar was co founded by Steve jobs instead of purchased from George Lucas.