skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As good as this article is, the reason I'm most glad I read it is for its link to his other article (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/the-thin...)

In my experience, one of the most illogical things is the difference in security in different countries. Back when I bought a Zippo lighter for the first time I flew from London to Paris. On the way out, I packed the Zippo in my suitcase, and just kept a disposable lighter in my pocket. As they let me keep it, on the way back I kept the Zippo in my pocket and was once again allowed to keep it. The following week, a return flight to Berlin, and on the way back the Germans confiscated the Zippo. It pissed me off, naturally, but just seems stupid - the same flight, with the same two cities at each end, and different rules for what you can take on depending on which direction you're going.

I've also noticed that security officers in America are much more friendly than pretty much any country I've been to in Europe or Asia. I was flying from London last year with a colleague, and while he was being patted down after the scanner beeped at him, I thought to myself that we had a few hours to kill, so decided to make a slightly stupid comment... "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?" Yeah, that cost us about an hour. Sure, they were probably right to double check after that, but for sure they were, after a short time, just delaying us to piss us off.

Flew out to LA a few weeks ago, and on arrival myself and three colleagues are waiting, having picked up are checked baggage, for the security screening. Three of us, a few places being our fourth in the line, look at each other and say "yeah, he's definitely going to get stopped." Sure enough, he was (he was wearing a black tshirt with a skull and crossbones on, a beanie hat, and carrying a sports holdall that looked, even to us, like it must surely contain drugs.) Being the idiot he is, when they pulled him over for a bag search he immediately said "I'm with them!" and pointed - we were immediately taken to one side, too.

However, the officer searching our bags was incredibly friendly. Asked about what we were doing in LA, but took in to a level beyond the "look for suspiciousness" concept, continuing a 15 minute conversation about various things from what we were doing to video games (related to our time there), what games he liked, etc. Having not found anything really problematic, he did tell me that I had twice the limit of cigarettes I was allowed to bring in to the country (I had 400 with me from the duty-free, for my two weeks out there) - just told me that he was supposed to confiscate and fine me, but would let me off. (This was pretty lucky - I had known the limit but decided to take the risk, given $3/pack duty-free or $12+/pack in NYC.) That kind of friendliness would never be shown (in my experience) by UK staff, or any other country I've visited.
Guys, before rounding up a mob, please try to find out the story from the other side as well. To put it simply there was a complaint about Tfl killing an app last week or something, AFAIK that developer didn't get permission to use the data whether or not it was publicly available or whomever used that data. It states in Tfl's website that written permission is required for certain things and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't get such permissions. In the article I noticed slight whining about other people doing the same thing which is (slightly)comparable to illegal downloading of films, countless people do it, but ultimately you have to seek permission from the content providers as you're utiliing their services.
Indeed. In particular, I've noticed that nearly all of the cities I've lived in and love (SF, Berkeley, NYC, Montreal) have rent control, whereas many cities that don't have rent control (Dallas, Houston, Phoenix) I've really had no interest in visiting.

The historical justification of rent control is that it allows for security of tenure: hence, even renters can put down roots, and a community can have time to develop. The communities I love seem to have required more time to develop than the cycles of the real estate market would allow. Even if I personally pay more rent, I benefit from those communities.

How do the economists model that? They probably don't. They do answer one question: the housing stock in Dallas and Houston is dramatically more affordable and probably built to a higher standard than the equivalent in SF and NYC, but the quality of life is significantly different (to my personal tastes, sacrificed.) The economists are answering the wrong question.

Rent control does seem to create quite an affordable housing shortage, though. One wonders, however, if ultimately it spurs on a lot of upscale development, since the premium you can charge for new units is so much higher, relatively. (giving you SF's South Beach...)

Edit:

Cato's article on the subject describes the change of Boston and Cambridge from a rent controlled to a free market system, on January 1, 1997.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274.html

Can anyone describe the change in vibe from before January 1, 1997 to now?
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That is just over 9.11 billion in acquisitions based on the listed numbers in that table alone.

That is one hell of a lot of money spent to acquire companies.

I wonder what the most spent by a single co in M&A would be?
Hats off to this fellow for promoting freedom and liberty. I am glad that people are slowly starting to realize we don't have a right to tell others what they can do with their bodies. If 19 passes it will be one tiny prick in the side of the petty tyrants who believe they have a right to force others to follow their views.
Sony Internet TV with Google TV review
"Design Patterns" exists to give a common vocabulary to the things we do with code and discuss the proper application of the techniques.
I was just told by the nice folks at CNN that 6mg of PETN is enough to blow through solid steel twice as thick as airliner skin. I'm afraid cavity searches are our only option here.
But economists would all agree that the models have limitations - that's not really news. The news here is that the limitations are a 10% slice rather than a 1% slice.

But that doesn't stop the theory being 90% correct.

Incentives-wise : is it easier to get people to buy a book about 'classical economics' or the 'whole new type of economics that makes those classical guys look like dinosaurs'?
The point of the linked article is that this is changing, and the TSA agents are now instructed to grope your genitals.
Pancreatic Cancer
Startup Quote: Todd Garland, founder, BuySellAds
Gum Disease
is an inflammatory condition affecting the tissues surrounding a tooth, and it is the leading cause of tooth loss. Gum disease is usually caused by a buildup of plaque, an invisible sticky layer of germs that forms naturally on the teeth and gums. Gum disease can be sneaky, sometimes causing little or no pain or irritation before permanent damage is done to your teeth. In another words, periodontal disease is a gradual process that starts with the buildup of plaque on teeth and then develops over time, causing swelling, soreness or infection of the tissues supporting the teeth. Once gum disease sets in, the toxins produced by the bacteria damage the teeth's connective tissue and bone, effectively destroying them and fostering tooth loss.
Why not just opt out of TSA all together? Take a car, bus or train, and enjoy getting there. Or better yet for non-Americans, just don't visit the U.S.A. Problem solved.
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Openly share and talk to people about your idea. Use their lack of interest or doubt to fuel your motivation to make it happen.

- Todd Garland (@toddo)
A while back there was a startup with this exact idea from the HN community. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294079) I love the idea, and said so then.

I talked with the developers a few times and learned recently that they had shelved the product. There are some existing enterprise solutions for electronic faxing. While building a service for smaller companies (and individuals that have the need to fax now and then) seemed to be a very difficult market to penetrate.

I'm not suggesting that their decision to shelve the product indicates it's not possible for you to succeed, but I do know they gave it a good shot and couldn't make money at it.

Perhaps going after a single industry, as you're suggesting, and vetting the idea (and price point) with them ahead of time, could get you closer to understanding if this is sustainable or not.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's a significantly better state of being than what it is currently, as he said in his blog article. Marijuana is a large part of the market, so it will be a significant chunk. Marijuana is also more practical for people to say yes to than drugs such as heroin. One step at a time.
Smuggling children is probably just as easy as smuggling thousands of pounds of coke, which happens regularly.

The largest cocaine bust was on the order of 48,000 pounds. Drug smugglers, on the high end of things, have access to submarines and secret tunnels that cross nation boundaries.

Child trafficking happens, and it the overlap between the major drug movers and the child traffickers is significant -- because they are both serving black market commodity on the level of distributors.

There are, however, a whole lot less people out there interested in buying children compared to the number interested in buying pick-a-substance. The reduced amount of profit available to high-level black-market distributors when you take away the market for drugs would, in my opinion, make it harder to find people willing to smuggle children.
Part kid, part machine, all cop
"Smoking cigarettes?"

If it means you will be blowing smoke around and potentially having a negative effect on me or my family, lots.

"Being HIV positive"

If you don't tell your partners and spread it around, it could have devastating effects on many peoples' lives.

"The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace."

I seriously doubt addicts have to worry about jail. Have you ever seen the show "Intervention"? If the laws were as bad as you say in the US, the police would be waiting outside the homes of those people. Many of them are illegal drug addicts (and the show explains exactly which drugs they are taking).

The pro-marijuana movement is less about freedom and is more about trying to legitimize a mind-altering substance.

"It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions."

Correlation != Causation. This seems to come up in every article except when it comes to drug related stats. It doesn't lead to corruption and gang violence. Those people would be just as corrupt and in gangs without drugs.

Also, it's your freedom and choice to put substances into your body..with or without laws. The tragedy is only brought on by the user and is most likely a symptom (the reason they got into drugs in the first place) of other problems. Most of the drug users I know had messed up childhoods/family life.

I also don't think we should make it any easier for an addict..because we will just end up with more people who won't really care about becoming addicted because there will be no consequences (IE: the government pays for your rehabilitation).
Hosting Suspended
Are any of them primarily motivated to write software by profit potential?
1) Make a scooter that costs you $1000.

2) Price it at $5,000. No one would actually pay that price of course.

3) Let people who have Medicare get them. Send the bill to Medicare, which is obligated to pay because it's a covered medical appliance.
When I reach the late application form I see all the same information I submitted prior to the deadline.
I'm sure they'll use an agent of the same gender they perceive you are. But what if you're gay? Will they give you someone of the opposite sex?

But then again - and I'm unfortunately stereoptyping here - but who many attractive TSA agents of any gender have you seen?
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a classic for a good reason. And it's available online:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html

You can get a lot out of SICP, if you take the time.
In addition to the many great suggestions already made, here are a few more:

Rent a (road) bicycle and ride a nice 2-hour loop along the waterfront (starting at OMSI and going along the Springwater Corridor)

Rent a (mountain) bike and bike in Forest Park (near NW 23rd)

Go to Council Crest Park, the highest point in Portland. Great views of the city and, if the weather is clear, at least 4 glaciated peaks.

Attend the farmer's market at Portland State University on Saturday mornings

Walk through Washington Park (head up Burnside to NW 23rd and then enter the park). From here, you can access the rose gardens, the Japanese gardens, Hoyt Arborteum, and the zoo.

Go skiing at Timberline lodge (they open for the season this weekend).

Go surfing at the coast (you can rent everything you need, including a warm wet suit, at Cannon Beach)

Go hiking on the coast: Saddle Mountain or Neahkahnie Mountain is good

Go hiking in the Gorge: numerous options of varying difficulties, consult Google

See Multnomah Falls, and take one of many numerous hikes in the area

See a movie at the Bagdad, a neat theater, and walk around the neighborhood there

Hike in Forest Park. The Wildwood Trail goes on for 30 miles. Pittock Mansion is cool. The Audobahn Society is a convenient stop.

See Mt. St. Helens. I'm not sure if the visitor center is open.

Drive to Hood River (can be combined on a long day trip to Mt Hood)

Drive to Mt Hood and hike up to the glacier

Go wine tasting in the Willamette Valley (numerous vineyards available)

Attend free art show on First Thursday

Rent a kayak and paddle the river, or go on a river cruise
Just testing how long it takes for Google to directorize a YC link.
There are in my opinion some benefits
1. There are a large number of people who are wanting to help you without anything in return - so for a startup where resources are already scarce its actually a good thing
2. Most of the "review my startup" posts come before the app/service has formally launched so it kind of works like a private launch for people
3. In the process of asking someone to review your startup. You'll get in touch with people who turn out be good sources for advice etc
4. Criticism is not in my opinion directed at someone's efforts but rather at the end product which is what the person posting asked for
5. Last thing - any marketing good or bad is better than no marketing
There appears to be a consensus forming within the VLC dev community that Apple does, in fact, enable 3rd party licensing such as GPLv2 to supersede the AppStore EULA.

http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-October...

Ultimately, this appears to be an unfortunate situation at Videolan as the method this all came out was probably not ideal (minimal or zero internal discussion prior to an individual contributor sending a copyright violation notice to Apple, posting to a videolan.org server announcing the notice with little or no indication of the notice not being directed by videolan.org, etc.).

The concerns I've seen re: PR on this mess shouldn't be taken lightly. One of my first reactions before digging in further was: so Videolan submitted their app, got it approved and now they're yelling at Apple about copyrights because it was approved? Clearly, that is not even close to the situation, but try and tell that to the thousands of headline skimmers.
What kind of sharing are you aiming to do? How big is your collection, and how many people are you sharing it with? If you'd like something to synchronize directories, you could use rsync. But you'd have to be more specific.

As for uses other than source code, there are some wikis which use git as their storage back end, for tracking versions.
No, but if I did, I'm fairly certain I could do it for less than $500,000/mo, assuming I can do something like "once your file has been hosted without being downloaded for more than x amount of time, users will get a link sent to an email a few hours or so after requesting the file".

Some tuning on that, and I'm fairly certain you could run things for less than $500,000k a month -- most files are probably uploaded, downed a few times in a week or two by a select number of people, and then forgotten.

Then again, and this is key here, I have not tried this. It's also something that could be difficult to patch into codebase if it wasn't considered early -- we're all familiar with the problem of coding ourselves into corners, especially when time is on the table.
Ok. I'm not actually that wedded to the order you do the two operations in. I think there is some value in writing tests first, so that you can verify they fail (before the code is written) and then work (once it is complete). But I think it's less important to do them first than to do them.

IMO, the "killer app" for unit tests is regression testing. If I make a change and the test suite still passes, I can be reasonably sure that I didn't break anything. All the other benefits are "nice to haves" in my mind.
Why not allow unfettered access to Wikipedia? What are you afraid will happen? That your kids will grow up with a positive attitude about sex and some knowledge about what it entails? Or are you worried that your kids will want to talk with you about a topic you find difficult or embarrassing to discuss? Or what? Kid's interests are normally age appropriate although they may mimic or mirror parental interests and behavior to gain your approval.

Many kids are sexually active at a fairly early age. The average age of menarche in the US is 13.5 years; the average age of first intercourse is 15 years. Breast development, which usually indicates the beginning of puberty, starts in about 10% of US white females at age seven. Kids are beginning sexual development earlier and earlier. Seems to me that an informed sex positive kid is better equipped to deal with life than one who is kept in the dark.
Never argue licensing with people with guns.
How and Why Design Impacts User Decisions
(260 Ah/380 V)

Please correct me if I've got the math wrong. I'm not really familiar with this area.

260 Ah/380 V = 98,800 Wh, or 98.8kWh

Though I don't pay my own electricity bill, I looked the rate up for here in Halifax[1] and the rate is CAD$0.11796/kWh (flat rate).

That means you could charge this for about CAD$11.83. Not too shabby.

Also, if I'm reading this right, there is another option to pay based on time-of-day usage. The 11pm-7am option is CAD$0.06028/kWh[2], making the total roughly CAD$5.98 per charge.

[1] - http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/aboutnspi/ratesandregulations/...

[2] - http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/aboutnspi/ratesandregulations/...
I love the open debate. Yeah, my opinions is obviously right, so if I get downvoted it must be because HN is turning into Reddit.
Thank you! The interview went well, just waiting on them to check my references and do a background check.

Patches welcome ;) The frontend to it may get open-sourced when I'm done with it, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to proceed with it yet.
That's a really interesting question. What I've found is that when I'm obsessed with a project it tends to almost always be on my mind, so that when I sit down to work on it I generally have a very good idea of what I want to accomplish and how to go about it (or at least how to get started on it). And when I know I'm only going to have a limited amount of time to make progress then I really try to do as much mental prep as possible so that when I do sit down I can really do some damage. That said, there are times when I end up getting sucked into reading HN and accomplish very little. ;(

By the way, one quick trick I use to avoid wasting too much time on HN is to use the Instapaper bookmarklet to print out the articles in a condensed format to read later when I'm away from the computer.
Yup, my dad did this for a while. Had to buy the truck. In a rural area this was a real losing proposition, the area he had to cover was so huge he was putting in 12hrs a day to get everything delivered. With all the wear and tear on the truck, causing it to need regular repairs it eventually became apparent that he was losing money delivering their packages.
"In school we were told of the many supposedly devastating effects marijuana use had but I see now that was clearly a misinformation campaign designed only to scare us from trying it."

It's not a good idea for any kid to try marijuana. It's funny because now it's the exact opposite. There is all kinds of misinformation on how it has absolutely no drawbacks. Most people won't even admit there is a possibility of addiction.

It may not be as bad as they say, but it is definitely a mind-altering drug that can destroy your ambition in life and make it very difficult to succeed.

Pretty much all of my friends that started smoking pot (even the ones that were really smart) all have dead-end jobs and dropped out of school. This and all of the stupid shit that they have done while high make me never want to touch the stuff.
I was thinking the same thing. I have two little ones - I've been a freelance programmer for a long time but only recently have I realized that I am actually a creative. Like a musician or writer, I don't get paid for typing away on my keyboard, I get paid for ideas. By and large.

This means I need time in my day where I do "nothing" - where my mind is at ease completely - it's surprising how well it works when you just give it a try. That hard problem you were trying to solve? An elegant solution will suddenly appear in your mind. It's like your mind works best when it can slave away in the background, and not be distracted by thoughts.

I am sure it's different for everyone - but despite the fact that we have to bill hourly, it's important to understand that insights have nothing to do with the number of hours spent staring at the screen.

So the answer to your question is simple - as long as there are periods where we can relax completely, that's where our best work gets done. Whether I stress out and frantically type for 2 hours, or relax my mind completely in whichever way that works best for me, both is work, and I propose the relaxing way is much more efficient.

It's a whole world view. Answer the question of how much can a programmer get done in 8 hours? Well - the answer can be anything from getting close to fixing a bug to writing the next hit web application.
>When it means instead "give us the power to force you to comply with stupid and inefficient rules about who can do what" (e.g. most modern union shops that I've encountered), that's bad for society.

You've somehow managed to bring two logical fallacies in the same sentence — the straw man and the false dichotomy. No one genuinely struggling for the rights of workers ever advocates for either of those ways, and those outcomes aren't by any means the only possible alternatives.

The purpose of unions has always been to bargain collectively in situations where individual actions alone would result in a greater detriment to each worker. A corporation is by nature this same mechanism applied in the market, so which side you prefer — the worker or the owner — is fundamentally one of politics in the end.
Yes, but you can still start by being compassionate. Being kind and loving isn't necessarily enabling. It may very well become it, but it isn't always enabling. Tough love is not generally the first step, and every single case is different and must be treated as such. Please remember this.