skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly this. Almost everyone of any political persuasion who has seriously considered the issue agrees that employer-based health insurance is a horrible system. Liberals want to replace it with single payer, I'd prefer a functioning individual market with a subsidized high risk pool for those who are uninsurable, but either would be better than the worst of both worlds that we have today.
I think there's a lot of range within design work so a smaller step up gets you exponentially better work. For example, $250 logo may be 10 times better than a $25 logo but a $2,500 logo might only be 1.5 or 2 times as good as the $250 one.

$15,000 for 4 pages of HTML is ridiculous, as is $150 for 4 pages. $1,500 should get you amazing work. I do a lot of work coding design to HTML/CSS and without being over-confident, I'd classify my skill in HTML and CSS as expert level. I charge around $200-$250 a page if coding directly from a PSD or image to HTML/CSS. Charging 15 to 20 times as much? I struggle to understand it.

If you want a designer on a mid-low budget, you can try Elance or oDesk, but set the hourly price you're looking for at $30-$50. There are good designers using those services but you need to get their attention.
Secrets of Freemium pricing - Make the Cheapskates Pay
I think you have the causality reversed. The entire idea of investing in a company is that the company can take advantage of the investment to do better than it could without the investment. If you haven't got a way to spend the money productively, don't take it.

For as cheap as a startup can be, it's the odd startup that honestly can't make use of a bit of funding to do better. You really can't get any more value out of having an employee? If that's the case, then stop seeking investment. You don't really have a startup at that point, you just have a business that isn't seeking growth. (The definition of "startup" is certainly in the eye of the beholder and I wouldn't limit it to "those seeking home runs", but surely the idea entails some sort of concept of succeeding and growing to some extent.)
Thanks for sharing your family dynamics - it really helps to get a picture of how other families operate. The family I work for has four kids and uhhh, four part-time nannies (don't ask, ha).

We'll have to look into Twilio some more and see if it's a better option for the project right now.

Although, expanding to bigger sized families that have lots going on is a good idea. I think we'll be leaning the iPhone route because of this, but unfortunately, we don't have any experience in that area - so it'll be interesting.

Thanks again for the detailed and varied feedback!
It sounded interesting so I clicked through to the actual 'Canvas' website. I am a little disappointed to see that the site is set up to require facebook for requesting invites.

It seems like we are getting closer and closer to facebook being our single online "ID Card" and I'm more than a little afraid of that. I don't think facebook is evil, though I know some people do, I just think they have a more caviler attitude towards privacy than I'd like. I hope we end up with a more open / distributed way to authenticate and identify ourselves...

Maybe open ID could catch on if facebook became an open ID provider?
The health care 'leap of faith' is a huge elephant in the room and a real drag on the growth areas of the economy.

It seems to me that the health care "leap of faith" is far less of an issue than the paycheck "leap of faith". It's far easier to survive without health insurance than without money for food and rent.

I'd downgrade subsidized health care to the #2 subsidy the govt could give to small business - a single-payer paycheck system would be the #1 thing the govt could do to subsidize entrepreneurship.
Very well done! They should listen to all the points.
The title is catchy, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the contents of the post.

If anything, it seemed like the post was somewhat complimentary of Microsoft and a lot more critical of Facebook and Google. OTH the title seemed to be harsh on Microsoft and doesn't mention Facebook or Google.
That looks awful, it looks like 4chan but trying to appeal to the facebook crowd. Where did the 625k go?
This is an interesting event for sure, but this article is far too high-level for HN IMO, spending a lot of time discussing what a "chip set" is and the difficulty of microprocessor design. It also doesn't seem to have many details about the actual problem, and can't seem to decide if the problem is on the processor or the chipset on the motherboards; is this a flaw in H67 or P67, are extant motherboards being recalled, etc.? I would really like to know this as I have Sandy Bridge equipment en-route right now.
Slight expansion: (LA/Santa Monica or SF)
LA: Django/JS/RoR
SF: RoR/JS

Ruby jobs are working in our Advanced Product Development group - TrueCar is turning a bit into an automotive ecosystem incubator focused on changing the process of buying cars from suck to awesome.

We're profitable and have a ton of cash to invest in rounding out our disruptive play in the auto space... We've got the speed and impact of working for a startup combined with the team and resources to invest heavily in your success. No PHBs, just MVPs and Lean Startup GTD.

So far we go from the best market pricing data (ClearBook: what's this car really worth?) to up-front, guaranteed pricing on cars with thousands of dealers nationwide (TrueCar/Zag). What else is a pain about buying cars today? You name it, we're going to fix it and reward well those who help us do it.

And we will definitely relocate experienced devs... Looking out the window now to the beach a couple blocks away (in Santa Monica), it's sunny and 65 - a little cold today actually ;-), so think about that the next time you're digging your car out from under the snow... And oh yeah, I can get to at least 4 mountains in around 4 hours if I need my powder fix...
I can not scroll the page on any iOS device. Is anyone else having problems? Is this a case of too clever web design?
World Bank Opens Data Catalogue for Social Good Competition
Estimating the Number of Web Transactions Per User Per Day
It would take a very-well-thought out Constitutional amendment through a State-powered Constitutional Convention (since Congress isn't going to trim its own wings) at a minimum, I fear. Any one of "very-well-thought out", "Constitutional amendment", and "Constitutional Convention" seems pretty unlikely anytime soon; the combination of all even more so. Still, these are crazy times politically, who knows?
Literally Eric Schmidt, Literally [video]
What exactly does the Internet know about you?
I try really hard to not get pigeon-holed into using my company's (one of the mentioned ones) stack but its really hard. Why? Cause when you have a full-time job then you're working 8-9 hours a day and there's really not that much time left over. I do a lot of side projects that usually revolve around non-proprietary technology but really there are only so many hours a day. I think it comes down to a decision of whether you want to sacrifice employment productivity over your own enrichment (which might never even pay off)
Openmesh
Well, by "noticed" I just mean that I noticed that I kept upvoting posts by this "Jacquesm" guy. I had noticed other people existed. :)
Simpler yes, but where does the gas come from?
Um, slight bit of NSFW failure here: http://i.imgur.com/dN2rw.png
Canv.as feels like a silly use of something the http://aviary.com API could have powered. Disappointed after all the hype.
If so, I'd hate to see what a severe case looks like.
Good point that I hadn't considered.
I knew the Tab numbers were fishy. in fact, I said as much today [1]. I've just never seen one in the wild and I had a hard believing Android had garnered a 22% segment of last quarter shipments.

I too agree the lack of a competitor for the $499 16GB Wifi iPad.

Plus I'm still not convinced the 7" form factor is going to have mass appeal.

Android manufacturers really do themselves a disservice with these kinds of lies ("mistruths" or "exaggerations" if you prefer).

I would be surprised if the iPad's market share was less than 90% of last quarter and 95% of total.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161624
"Founded in 2006" & "legendary" + military metaphors => FAIL
Wow. I just read the Inc Magazine article about this guy from 2009: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

Highlights:

1. The site makes $10 million/year.
2. He has three employees, all customer service. He does everything else.
3. He pays himself $5 million/year.

This quote is particularly telling: "At other sites, when one thing goes slightly wrong, the reaction is to buy more servers or hire a Ph.D.," he says. "It's almost unbelievable -- it's like people are trying to justify their jobs by spending money. This isn't rocket science."
Personally I'm less likely to apply to YC now - if there's one thing I hate it's giant heaps of money.
Do what is best for the company. If time is of the essence (ie - hot sector with lots of potential competition), you probably want to get your app out the door as soon as possible. If this is the case, would it help for one of you to quit your job and develop the app full time while being supported by the other founder + angel investment? Or is it possible that you could both quit your jobs and develop full time? It really depends on your personal situations as well as many other factors. Tough to come up with a concrete answer, but good luck!
Facebook's next big media move: Comments
Where are the options for never wanting to apply before and continue to not want to apply now? "Other" option doesn't fit.
The other question is whether or not pg would ever put a cap on the amount of startups accepted into a batch. I am pretty sure that the next pool of applicant will be way larger, thus siphoning off talents from the other incubators/angels should pg chooses to accept all the good ones. This will then definitely trigger a defense mechanism by the others to then increase the amount of money funded, probably to more than 200k.
Why nerds rule the world
There are different different values of "successful."

Not everyone thinks that being successful means becoming an executive. Many people equate success to being able to pay their bills and have fun away from work. And in most cases, that doesn't mean working your butt off.
I know I'll never change Hacker News's mind on this issue considering the preexisting bias here, but there are ways to sever health insurance from employment other than single payer national health care. For example, the government could equalize the tax treatment of the employer health care market and the individual market. Or the world's 8th largest economy, California, could pass its own universal health care and prove to the rest of the nation that such services are indeed a boon to innovation, and not an anchor as some of us suspect.

There are a few of us who have valid concerns about what would be the world's second largest bureaucracy, taking the title from Medicare whose price controls and regulations wreak havoc on the US health system as is (The largest in terms of spending is the US military. But a national US health service could surpass that too).

Given the US federal budget deficit, the day is fast approaching where the order of the day will be triaging the old social entitlements of FDR and Johnson, not adding new ones.

Now back to your regular-scheduled Democratic Socialism.
The galaxy tab is frankly quite terrible. I tried one out in the local T-mobile store and was surprised at how awkward it felt. The keyboard was rather inaccurate and it was hard to do basic things like change the URL in the browser. Overall the experience felt very non intuitive, even though the interface looked polished.

Don't be deceived by the pretty screenshots, actually using the Galaxy tab is a pain.
Doesn't matter, awesome Harry Potter fanfiction is where the real money is. You need to get a book deal.
Egypt's Net on Life Support
Exposed: Apple’s Terrible Sin in China [video]
This is bad stuff:
"Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die."
Housing Markets: The rentership society
After working in several previous startups founded by other people who were based around VC money, my next project will be personal, small, and focused on long term maintainable growth, rather then a huge payday. I enjoy working in a startup environment, the exploration, the many-hats, and the freedom, but I'm personally sick of the risks of growing big fast, especially when you rely on outside financing that could dry up without warning. (Happened to 2 of the 4 startups)

Edit: Of course without outside funding, I'm currently 4 years away from that attempt. Which may seem like an eternity to some people.
They don't have to be extraterrestrial per se..

You might want to take e.g. a look at this excellent piece of literature:

Roswell and the Reich: The Nazi Connection

http://www.amazon.com/Roswell-Reich-Connection-Joseph-Farrel...

Or listen to some interviews:
http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html
Sorry to see you go and thanks for all the great insights over the years. Hopefully you stop by a few more times to read all of these appreciative comments.
I don't know what our hiring schedule looks like, but MyEdu (Austin) will be growing its developer team at some point. I'll try to get details posted in a jobs thread when openings are definitely available. Most advertised positions have been posted on Craigslist, and I'm sure a HN listing would attract a higher quality of response on average.

[Short blurb: http://myedu.com, college planning tools, PHP/JS, newbies welcome, laidback work environment.]
Looks fantastic. The removal of colons and parentheses makes this a net win over Sass, not even taking into account everything else. In a verbose and redundant-by-design language like CSS, anything which reduces the total number of keystrokes makes my fingers glad.
Why doesn't other fit? How can there be anything that isn't covered by other?
Why to use link instead of import for CSS
Jacques, I remember you telling me once that karma here at HN was as gameable as it is anywhere. I remain convinced that you've gamed it by making consistently high-quality, thoughtful, well-supported comments and posts helpful to the people likely to vote here. You've certainly earned your HN retirement, if it's that time; but the community will be poorer for it.
I think contributing to open source is more about "fixing a broken window" than a service finding me projects it thinks I should work on or that have lots of broken windows. I have more than enough things that I should work on, and when I contribute to open source its always because the tools available didn't work for me. GitHub makes it pretty easy to find projects you're interested in and pretty easy to start contributing code to those projects, so I guess I don't get it.

Why would I want to contribute to someone's project that I don't even use? What would inspire me to all of the sudden want to hack on git's internals and then not dive into the source? On one hand, yeah, finding some menial bug or documentation fix I can work on to start contributing to a project is great, but at the higher levels just presenting tasks from issue trackers for me to smash, I don't think is a great idea.

Look at the ActiveRecord/AREL rewrite, sure @tenderlove was just squashing bugs in the Lighthouse tracker but only because, as he says, "AT&T Interactive started paying me to work on Rails" (http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two-point...) If you don't dive in real deep you can't really make things better and that takes a lot of time. You end up investing a lot in the project and the people around the project. So I don't see where GitHub doesn't support this. How does your product makes any of this any easier/better/more full of awesome?
Ten Angels/VCs respond (anonymously) to Yuri/Conway's $150k YC offer
We emailed the 250 members of the Open Angel Forum and asked them for feedback on the stunning news. Nine of them are off the record, Dave McClure went on the record.

My thoughts are at the end (I love the news and would do the same if I was flush with Facebook shares :-).
Wakemate and Wattvision have hardware components. They still have some software, of course, but they sell their hardware.
Freezing meals is a smart way to go if you live alone and can't cook meals that get mostly eaten in the same day.

Most people don't know that the frozen meals they see in stores are typically low quality not because of the nature of frozen foods but because of the expectations of the market and the need to preserve frozen food for long periods of time. If you're cooking on your own then you can use higher quality ingredients and you can avoid the compromises needed for mass-produced, highly preserved foods (meals that will be preserved just fine for up to a month in your freezer are not necessarily suitable for being mass-produced or for being preserved for months to years).
Thats fair! I wish I did know everything. Thanks for the response!
OpenID: The Web’s Most Successful Failure
The NYC subway system as a string instrument
150k is anything but heaps of money.
Special Report: Dream Jobs 2011
I can imagine seeing an increase of interest/participation of talent around the world for these kind of projects due to the recent events in Tunisia/Egypt.

it will be very interesting to see where these projects are heading to in the (near) future. this might be also quite interesting for those in stable democracies, where the fear of shutdowns is not that prominent.
Silver: A Redis-backed cacher, indexer
You wouldn't have to take the money.
What technology recruiters are looking For
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/dream-job-help-w...
I can't help but wonder if there was a method to their madness. The brain requires vast amounts of caloric energy to do anything interesting, and maybe all that corn syrup went to good use: solving problems and writing code.

Anecdotally, one of the best programmers I've ever met was bean-pole skinny and fueled himself with a big glass of OJ in the morning, cheeseburgers and fries at every lunch, and eating candy all day while writing code. (Of course, he also got lots of physical exercise).

Just a thought.
This is really intense! I salute the mind level that conceives such a concept (and comes up with a cool visualization).
I've got a family, and need to pay rent. This makes a huge difference to the feasibility of the whole adventure. I'm sure I'm not alone.
as of a few minutes ago the property colons are optional :) some people wanted them, but I agree
So people can't adapt? Once you've worked in one place, you're stuck that way forever?
The $17k honestly is so small, that it's largely irrelevant. And pursuing it will just distract you, and waste your time.

For that small a price, I can fund the idea myself, and own the company 100%.

But that's the point of the incubator. Maybe it's good for a broke kid out of college. But any seasoned professional in his late 20s-30s, "should" have the sufficient funds to support himself, and fund his vision.

But as someone else has said, maybe the benefit of the program, is the mentorship that can help focus your ideas, and bring it to market.
Does it really matter? It seems the leftists have flooded ycombinator and don't really want to hear anything besides their own viewpoint.
Running a site as large as plenty of fish solo likely doesn't leave one with a ton of time for new development, unless he completely ignores customer service emails.
How to Save Image From URL Using PHP
actually, i think it's the kind of system that just works well, period, as long as you can devote an entire day to cooking. i actually live with my fiancee, and the practice has become go shopping one day, do all our cooking the next. we just setup a laptop somewhere in the kitchen, and either stream music or stuff off the netflix instant queue. it's done good things for our diet, our budget, and our relationship
Thanks.

You can try joining the beta, we'll let you know when it is available.

It's a little unfortunate that the term argument is perceived so negatively. It is the formal term though.

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

These types of arguments are by nature combative and adversarial, and won't work for Dale Carnegie following people who want to network and make friends. It's designed for people who are interested in logic and truth and understanding as opposed to a fun social interaction.

It is about more effective and less frustrating arguments. If you come from the perspective of, arguments are bad in general and you shouldn't argue, perhaps it's because of how terribly it has worked in the past? Sign up, and perhaps it'll change your mind.
When is AMD's Bulldozer slated for release, btw?
I have no clue wtf moot is thinking with this. Apart from anonymity, the whole approach of piggybacking on facebook and using an invite-based membership system seems completely antithetical to the uniquely open and no barriers to entry nature of his well-known imageboard.
Read the article. It's not that people can't adapt, it's that they need to make themselves adaptable. Startups need people who can be productive on day one. Someone who has only worked with proprietary technology cannot meet that requirement.

Ergot, if you're working at a place that relies on proprietary technologies, you need to take proactive steps to not tie yourself exclusively to them.
The Black Triangle
ForeverSave Prevents Lost Work on the Mac
Facebook once again trying to be the foundation on which all communication and exchange is based on.
Application Security at source delivers 4 x ROI?
I was just hired here a month or so ago. This is by far the best place I've ever worked. Great people to work with (all of which are smarter than me), they treat us well with awesome catered lunches and dinners, supply us with the best hardware, and keep us happy.

Bottom line - Yammer makes sure you don't have to worry about anything so you can focus on the awesome problems that we get to solve.

(update)
Also, forgot to add that we get to work with all the cool toys - I've been having a blast with node.js :)
No shit. My take on boom and bust is:

- Boom is the process by which the money of the middle classes is transferred to the top few %

- Bust is when they announce that the transfer is complete
In this case it might be possible that he just doesn't want /b/ to turn it into a giant ocean of puke right from the beginning.
I think that was the point.

There's a time and place for anonymity and it's called 4chan.

You will especially understand this move of his if you listen to his TED talk and some other things that he has said/written over the years. Namely that anonymity brings with it complete and utter nonmonetizability ... from what I've heard he has [some] porn advertisers avoiding him because of 4chan's reputation and their not wanting to be associated with such a website. (just imagine what some more reputable advertisers think)
Best Flash RPG Game on Facebook | InfoMov.Com
The tweeples got me sorted...update your wordpress install. Doh't. No virus...it was ad link spam.
Depends on the scale you are talking about.

Can you create a one man startup and sustain yourself for $1000/mo? Sure.

Can you create YouTube, FaceBook, Google for the same? No, you really can't.

And if you are shooting for someone in between, can you compete against a similar company with 5-10 engineers when you only have one? Seems like a big disadvantage.
Confusion and Recriminations Surround PlentyofFish Hack
Huge ISPs want per-GB payments from Netflix, YouTube
I know EDW is a legend in CS, but that doesn't make everything he wrote insightful. If you thought this was a long-winded, hard-to-read, pointless rant, let me assure all his essays in his later years(i.e. since he took up residence at UT Austin) are not worth your time. Perhaps some earlier stuff might have more value.
I don't see any step 3 - what's he selling?