skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the government should provide the following services:

1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."

2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.

The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.

3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.
Free education doesn't have to mean government education. A system of vouchers or subsidies could work. I'm not familiar with America's historical free schools. Were they charities?

The 25% number is completely arbitrary. I picked a number that is lower than what I pay today and gives the government a whole lot to play with. There's a good chance we'd be better off with a sales tax or transaction tax instead of an income tax, but it's not important for deciding what services the government should provide.
It's a hard problem. One of Hacker News's greatest strengths is that no one can downvote submissions. That will result in every story getting a fair chance at the front page (no bury brigades). However, any general topic that people find sufficiently interesting will get upvoted. And -technically-, stuff like this isn't offtopic. We're hackers, and we find it interesting. But this thread isn't really hacker related.

The only counterbalance to this right now is admins killing topics. Doing that after a story has generated a lively discussion like this one might cause users to revolt.
Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.
I don't believe in the death penalty or intellectual property rights. Thanks anyways.
> Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point.

What's the incentive for them to provide more, particularly since fiber lines usually cut across constituent boundaries, yet don't cut far enough to make a majority in Congress?
I think a 99% literacy rate shows the success of our schools at providing a certain base level of education. If our poor population had to choose between food, energy, and school the literacy rate would plummet.
Nice story... makes you appreciate how people can make it through tough times, and still come out on top.
Lobes of Steel - Neurogenesis and exercise
How does the brain make new neurons? Exercise helps (and a few other things...).

Just remember the old ontological vs. empirical distinction. Effects of exercise (and substances) are easier to study in rats most esp. relative to human learning-related changes. We're doing the neuroimaging work of complex learning (think circuit diagrams), but it doesn't get us to the neuronal level.

Revolutionary bottom line of the last five years: You're producing new neurons every day (and exercise seems to help produce more). But whether and how they're used is up to you.

"We've always known that our brains control our behavior," Gage says, "but not that our behavior could control and change the structure of our brains."
How does the brain make new neurons? Exercise helps (and a few other things...).

Just remember the old ontological vs. empirical distinction. Effects of exercise (and substances) are easier to study in rats most esp. relative to human learning-related changes. We're doing the neuroimaging work of complex learning (think circuit diagrams), but it doesn't get us to the neuronal level.

Revolutionary bottom line of the last five years: You're producing new neurons every day (and exercise seems to help produce more). But whether and how they're used is up to you.

"We've always known that our brains control our behavior," Gage says, "but not that our behavior could control and change the structure of our brains."
Good ideas, but I still think that having no real free education will end up destroying the lives of a large number of poor kids.

An unwed mother has a six year old boy that is only a burden to her. She doesn't care about her son's future so she's not going to spend her hard earned money on sending him to school. He goes to the free schools for the two years it takes to learn how to read.

What happens next? The mother isn't going to take out a loan to pay for her son's education. Does this eight year old have to decide if he wants to take out loans to keep going to school? I don't think many economically oppressed eight year olds would make the right decision.
Collecting minimal user information
Feature request: validate usernames by issuing a HTTP GET to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=%s
Virtual Reality, where you can do and have anything and everything you want, thus obviating real-world conflicts and mediating.
Well, they missed the company I'm using. Oh well. I find it hard to imagine people paying 100+ a month for a VPS when you can get a dedicated machine for less than that.

Watch out for VPSes by the way. They generally don't allow swap spaces, which can completely prevent the use of certain systems. If you're using LAMP, you're okay, of course.
The problem is that each vote change the number of points, so if you happen to be the first down-voter, it will become zero. But if another user up-voted the same item just before you, then your vote change nothing.

I seems that reddit solved this problem by not showing the number of points for new messages.

There could be a "new" status, marked in a special way, which explain why you vote it not showing. After enough users voted, and using the editor vote to change the weight of other votes, move the item to voted status, and show its point count.
"... Wasn't this submitted long ago on on ycnews ? ..."

Might have been (same article with different url), show me? Now if hackernews.yc had a search function I'd look for it and not bother but as it is I have to go to google, then search something like http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fycombinat... Maybe I should add this submission check to my sub-que software before I submit. It would scale much easier if this or similiar searches could be provided at submission. But even then there is no guarantee that this will work, so I don't bother.
Google Research Publication: Evaluating Similarity Measures
I'm not sure what you mean by 'provide more'. The entire idea behind the government owning the infrastructure and not the services that run on them is to stimulate fair competition between private enterprises. I wouldn't really want the government to do more than provide a usable signal to my jack.

Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.

I live in Alberta and up until a few years ago the telecom was owned and operated by the provincial government. It dropped copper to every house. I don't see why fiber would be any different. Some provinces still run their own telecoms.
Both you and cperciva seem to be fundamentally theory people. IMO, you both completely missed what mencius meant when he wrote 'soundest.' When he says sound, he means that a field is worthwhile, both because it has problems that are interesting in a purely technical way and because solutions to them are in some way actually useful to non-CS humanity. When you say sound, you mean pedantically verifiable for the benefit of other theorists. Graphics is sound because not only does it have interesting math, it aids or entertains laymen; PL research isn't, because nobody except PL researchers cares.
Need some wood?
Dabble: one of the only really innovative Web 2.0 apps out there.
Oops! I'm sorry for the confusion. I originally wrote that only moderators would see the flagging, but when I edited the post, I lost that part of it. No wonder you hated the idea so much.

As for what I meant by "types of submissions", I had just seen an "ask YCNews" article about republicans and democrats make the front page, that I hoped to silently vote down. I came up with my idea and added this comment (correctly) to the feature request thread, instead of below the parent, but the fact that the idea lost its context escaped me at the time.
Reading from Barcelona, Spain... It does not work :(
At least where I was (Pittsburgh), CS majors got some of the best perqs (best pay, great toys, best hope of finding a great job). Contrast that with the Humanities Ph.D.'s (no money, no toys, no job prospects).

But the emotional ups and down they describe are a constant across fields. Smarter people than you will quit. The crappiest "bosses" rarely get fired. Indeed, the most important advice if you're going to go: Make sure your future boss is highly thought by their current students (after a few beers). And if they have no other students - Run, Forest! They're inexperienced in the art. Your adviser (and later, committees) has the power to crush you. Always get good reviews first.

Otherwise, it is pretty fun. You learn cool things while talking to superbright folks and you get paid for the pleasure. The key is how much independence you can carve for yourself.

In my opinion (but that's all I know), second only to startupping - grad school prepares you as an entrepreneur. You learn to test ideas, gather data, interpret results, and refine the process. It's iteration all the way through. I'd say if you don't think you're ready to startup, it's not a bad place to get your bearings.
The network effect and the virtuous circle...
Just want to share the knowledge of the network effect and the virtuous circle which may be key for your startup too.
It's easy to get a big response about any topic people feel strongly about. I don't think there's anything hard about killing this thread. I really wish I could. Purely political and religious threads must be banned or this site will quickly begin to suck. These topics are simply too divisive. They will pollute the entire site.

Who cares about a "user revolt"? This site has a focus and that's what makes it great. Those people can discuss this stuff a million other places. There's only one place for hacker news.
Admins: please kill this political thread.
So what kind of submissions do you want to see exactly???
People look at someone applying for a position like this as a big red flag. I think it's that simple. As others have pointed out hiring is typically a "lemon market". Unless the hiring manager is really good it makes some sense for them to move on to the next candidate.
Anything that's interesting to hackers with an explicit ban on topics primarily religious or political in nature.
How to raise funding, if you are outside US
Dear Friends
I have a working application, and i am planning to riase funds for the application. The application allows students and teachers to collaborate, and allow interactive private tutoring. We developed alpha, working version are are improving upon it.
Can someone please suggest ,
1. If we can raise funding for the work , considering we are not located within US.
2. Do you think the idea has a potential ?
The partial working version of online tutor can be seen here
http://www.geniteam.com/openLaszlo.jsp

Thanking in advance
Khurram Samad
One idea: Look at sites you like and find out who designed them. You can use Google to connect the dots if it's not obvious. Oftentimes designers will list them in their portfolios.
I posted this elsewhere in its own topic yesterday, but it is relevant here too. I think there should be simple guidelines either displayed or linked to on the submit page. I would propose "No politics. No old stuff. If you post a question, post 1, not >1."
As staunch implies, a good approach is to keep the general nebulous statement about what we do want, but then be pretty specific about what we don't want.
Or once you find them, just do it yourself and borrow from their design elements.
Feature request: give us a text box that we can use to zoom into an area we type in. That is, if I just type in Pennsylvania, it will take me to that area. This will be even more needed when you start from the world view. And/or capture the click event through the GMaps API and recenter and zoom in one tick every click.
How about a little custom(?) microformat on our "about" sections that you fetch and refresh every X days? That solves the authentication and updating problems. That's not my idea either. It's what the Perlmonks starting doing maybe 7 years ago.

<!-- location:latitude=34.05.14,longitude=-84.16.05 -->

http://tinymicros.com/pm/index.php?goto=BigMonkMap

More inspiration from the Perl Mongers:

http://www.pm.org/groups/map.html
I'm using http://prgmr.com at the moment, $5/month 64MB RAM,
1 GB disk and 10 GB Transfer
Biometric identity management.

You need a single namespace for human beings, which is cryptographically protected so that the only entity which can link a person's reputation to their biometric profile is a court of law. When there can only be one of something - and there are good reasons for not federating biometrics databases - then it makes sense for the government to offer that service, rather than private enterprise.

On top of this, build a contract infrastructure - a set of technical standards for digitally signed contracts - this could be free market, but the standards body should again be unitary, so that contract standards are singular. Hence, the standards body is quasi-governmental.

This is infrastructure which is essential to commerce, but - because of the namespace issues - it cannot be entirely provided by the free market, which would naturally tend to fragment the namespace. You can see an entire parallel chain of development with DNS.

Power grid: do not offer, do not want. http://smallisprofitable.org

Similar approaches for water supply and sewage treatment: set standards for those offering the services, sue those who fall below those standards, leave it to the market. This stuff used to be unitary-provider 200 years ago, which is why govt. still does it now, but technology has moved on.

I have a couple of not-read-for-prime-time papers on the concept I've been working on for disaster relief called "State In A Box" that I can pass along if you are interested: hexayurt@gmail.com http://hexayurt.com/
There were plenty of automobiles around in 1965. I think they even had helicopters way back then.
How to successfully write Mac Software
Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used.

You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.
http://microformats.org/wiki/location-formats
Compact disc hits 25th birthday
you can check for a lot of good designs at templatemonster, and do it by yourself or buy the template for 60-70$.
I understand in some language cultures people would say "the glass fell from my hand" rather than "I dropped the glass". The latter is better because of the acknowledgement of responsibility.

Similarly, I prefer his suggestion of "error tracking" to "bug tracking".
You have never spent hours baking in 35C weather waiting in traffic backed up at a tollbooth on the Italian Autostrada. Sometimes traffic is backed up for kilometers and kilometers.

The people that own them don't really care that much, because they get their money just the same, and since they have a monopoly, they don't have any real competition unless you take the train or a plane, which simply isn't possible in many cases.
Thanks for all the comments, im trying to source out the designer from a site that I liked.

But if anyone has a good designer, can you please email me : red rory ( a t ) gmail ( dot ) com
How would you build a social site to generate logos for abstract concepts?
One possibility is to build something like http://espgame.org but with randomly generated abstract logos shown to players. You could then see what sorts of words are associated with these abstract logos.

Another possibility is to have players sketch logos for abstract concepts and score them based on how in tune those sketches are with those from other players.
From my point in view, encouraging scientists to be socially/politically active is a good thing (what's the alternative?) The problem is the funding process. You don't get money for saying that you don't know.

In my field, a semi-prominent researcher recently published a paper showing that the solar cycle is fundamentally unpredictable. He was ignored, because if it's true, a lot of grant money will just vaporize (the solar cycle destroys satellites every 11 years or so). The same effect is at work in climate science, for sure. Some researchers on solar activity try to claim that the sun is tied to global warming, to get a slice of that pie.

It's all very, very unfortunate, and it's hard to think of a solution. Technologically, it might be wise to register formally all (quantifiable) predictions by an individual, to hold them accountable, and to know whom to trust.
It is my understanding that NDA's only protect propietary and unique information in a very narrow scope, It does not protect things that could be found by others in the public realm or that are readily known by others in the space.

So the general idea then would not seem to be protected. Only things like algorithms, some source code, some processes, and very unique customer lists are protected. For the most part almost every NDA I've seen is too broad in scope to be truly enforceable.

In my opinion you walk a fine line by trying to get people to sign the NDA and in the end you turn a lot of people off if you push too hard. It seems to me that the only people really hung up on NDAs are the people who are sharing things they shouldnt be sharing in the first place.

Note: I'm not talking about NDAs in M&A situations or in employee company relations and partnership agreements for established companies...things like these actually do hold weight. Essentially I'm agreeing that the NDA is often focused on too greatly by early stage companies
You could use genetic algorithms as well for the designs. If you are looking for a logo for some concept X, you could try picking designs from a population with higher probability for mutation/crossover whenever they have a stronger association with concept X (where this association is determined from player input).
Someone at BarCampBlock yesterday suggested that in the past >15 years, vc-backed startups of all types accounted for 23% of successful exits, while focusing on tech-specific startups raises that number to 46%. It sounds possible, but a source wasn't provided - it'd be interesting to determine how successful these 'successful exits' were, and if the size ($) of the exit is correlated to the presence of VC. I imagine it would be.
Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage
Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.

One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.

In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.
Somewhat related: a PageRank-inspired approach to web page similarity:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~glenj/simrank.pdf
Business evolution: Networking
Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example:

Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will reduce driving efficiency.

Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get less efficient production.
I was thinking that free education would extend up through 7th/8th grade, more for political reasons than for economic reasons. An educated citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy. Without it the whole system risks collapse.

But primary school should teach things necessary to evaluate the claims of others, not to prepare you for the working world, however. Reading, writing, and rithmetic are obvious ones. But instead of branching off into algebra/biology/geology/etc, I think they should teach probability & statistics, economics and finance, the scientific method in general (with the emphasis on the process, not on the findings), and a lot of history.
Keep in mind the "jealous priesthood" is like the first open-source movement. The real problem is not making money but not publishing your code and improving what's out there. Stay connected and help translate research into technology.
Startup Founder Diversification Ideas?
For a while now, I've been trying to think of possible arrangements where startup founders could achieve some diversification along the lines of VCs and angel investors. Two initial ideas:

1) A group of n founders give each other x% of their companies. I suspect n or x could not be that big for obvious reasons.

2) Individual founders swap y% of their companies with each other. Diversification emerges after multiple swaps.

As a startup founder, would you ever consider doing something like this?