skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How expensive would it be to start a number of small independent Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs)?

I'm thinking of a decentralized "movement" of geeks organizing what's required to get neighborhoods and villages online: an omnidirectional antenna high enough that Line of Sight can be provided to most residents, a high bandwidth fiber optics connection at the center, and subscriber antennas at the residences.

I've tried to find more information on Motorola Canopy technology in the past days -- look at this example deployment in Nova Scotia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_for_Rural_Nova_Scotia...

From what I'm gathering, Canopy can be deployed over unlicensed frequencies (2.4 and 5 Ghz), allows for hundreds of subscribers connecting to a single Access Point, can provide up bandwidth in the 5-10 Mbps range, etc.

Are there particular advantages to Canopy over 802.11x? Could it become viable, with infrastructure costs spread over some years, to run a small local WISP? I'm thinking of a "Real Internet" designation/"certification" that could be given out to any ISP that follows a basic code of conduct: offers at least one unlimited transfer connection plan and does not throttle traffic.

Is starting an ISP, regardless of the physical layer, overly regulated by CRTC? The Wikipedia page says "The CRTC does not regulate rates, quality of service issues, or business practices for Internet service providers" -- is that in effect true?

How can anyone manage with 25 GB per month? Are Netflix or the NFB going to do something about this? If not, can "we"?
A bit of anecdotal evidence from a Norwegian citizen to counter your "doctor vs janitor" argument: I'm more than well aquainted with a doctor and she is more than happy to pay her taxes, in order to benefit the rest of society.

You should also know that even though the tax system in Norway works to even the footing of different posed people financially, it does not wipe out the class difference between a janitor and a doctor. Their net income will still differ by quite a bit (up to 400% at least).

The benefit here is that someone who is considered poor, and would perhaps be forced to live in the street, and only serve to increase the crime rate, will instead recieve help. And the doctor can sleep peacefully at night knowing that the police is out protecting. The hospital emergency staff is ready to recieve the next cardiac arrest patient, the road will be cleared from that heavy snow fall during the night, the list goes on.

In my view the philosophy of the Norwegian tax models is less worries == more happiness, and that is exactly what this model offers for everyone included.

On the other hand its very easy to paint a rosy picture of Norway in a case like this. Mostly becasue US is so easy to outcompete on many of the issues directly involved. Crime rates, mortality rates, helthcare and so on. Norway does of course, like any country, suffer from several political problems. Spending, immigration and government control is perhaps the most fleeting issues right now. But they diminish substantially compared to the issues the US has to face the next decade. And perhaps even worse is it, that the political environment in the US seems allmost hopeless. With the country polarized into two extremes. In Norway the debate is still very much alive around all of these issues. In the US you can quickly get yourself into a place you dont want to be by just shifting your perspective slightly.

Ok now i gotta stop. Let the bashing commence. :P
A large nuke will produce around 3GW, a large solar plant will produce 0.1GW. So if building a nuke every day won't do it, sounds like building 30 solar plants every day won't either.

So I guess we start building two nukes every day?
Agreed, funny tho
The real problem is the high cost of health care. This article argues persuasively that it's government interference in the sector that has caused the enormous costs:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...
This is a topic very interesting to me, because over the years I've written a lot of call center and customer service software used by distributed teams. I also worked as a developer remotely for Linden Lab for long time, which had a highly distributed workforce, using Second Life and other things as a primary interaction platform. There are things I've observed when writing software used by distributed teams that make a huge measurable difference in productivity.

When working remote, it's easier to feel like it doesn't really matter if you put your nose to the grindstone, since nobody can tell. So I found it made a dramatic difference in productivity when I implemented a simple sidebar that showed what ticket each member was working on, and how long they'd been working on it. It was intended to be sort of like an office: in an office, when you see your team members working away, it's a little more emotionally difficult to take time off to surf your favorite website or something.

For customer service, video game mechanics help a lot: completing each ticket gets you closer to your goal. Keeping quality metrics up gives you a visible indication that you're a good person. It's not easy to implement and sell these kinds of features, but it's also not easy to keep people motivated (whether they're remote or not).

Scrum and frequent voice communication help a lot as well. There are downsides to distributed teams, but there are big upsides, as well. Distributed teams, while not perfect, have many benefits. The key to making it work, as with so many things, is to figure out ways to make everyone care and want to do their best. In absence of that vital culture of giving a shit, even a team that's co-located together is not going to do well. In my experience, that culture of excellence is even more important than being in the same place.
AccelerEyes Talks About Matlab GPU Acceleration
Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011
I am watching it right now and they are showing a live feed of Tahir square, Cairo.

Maybe their studio there is down and they're feeding from a lone camera on the ground, straight back to their studios elsewhere in the world.

EDIT: This does in fact seem to be the case.
Mobile ID isn't anything new. In my home country (Estonia) there is already fully functioning mobile id system, which works almost with every mobile phone and is considered as secure as smart-cards.

http://www.id.ee/public/Mobiil_ID_animation/
<<< This clip shows how it basically work.

EDIT: http://www.ria.ee/27525 <<< some more info, if anyone is interested.
With a 4 character password, which won't keep out anyone with a bit of free time. And remote-locking solutions are non-solutions for anyone determined and intelligent - just stick it in a Faraday cage.
First, radio amateurs are regulated everywhere more than the current internet is.

Secondly, there is zero privacy in amateur radio communications. Encryption of any form is expressly forbidden.

Thirdly, commercial use of the radio amateur service is severely restricted as well.
> When debugging you have to find the source of the problem in the PHP, though ideally after that you can just find the matching Pharen code and go from there.

You could always just add the S-Expression that became the php code as a comment. From there it should be trivial to find it in the Pharen code.
Could you explain to someone completely unfamilliar with the internal economies of Washington state why the western portion of the state is forced to buy food from the western portion, or why it couldn't buy the electricity from a separate state of Eastern Washinton?
The regional issues such as education and the Hanford site...are regional issues, if I'm not putting too sharp a realpolitc edge on my examination.
Ya, sign on up and refer some friends. ;) We're letting people into the WYSIWYG editor in the next few days. We've got the first few sites built on our platform launching soon (hopefully tonight). We're also creating a widget for you to use if you don't want to use our site builder/hosting.

The basic formula is very similar to the Forkly/Hipster strategy, but we've got some more ideas that we're going cooking up as well. We want to create a tool to help people launch, recruit, retain and build relationships with users.
500 now.
I want this now! I've signed up and pushed it out. Then had my biz partner do the same. Want to use it for our clients too. Pow.
1) Does it matter if they pay for their peering arrangements? (See who they peer with here: http://www.datacentermap.com/as/577_upstreams.html ). They still need to carry this traffic to a peering location. That's not free. They still need to support their peering agreements with staff & seriously expensive routers. Not free. They need to support the ISP's whose traffic they are carrying - arguably they ISP's have paid for this, but per GB pricing is fair. It is cheaper to run the content over their own network. They will run over an internal CDN, reducing transit costs to a fraction of say Netflix.

2) I think there is some misunderstanding. The way I read all these articles, the problem is the link from the exchange to the provider PoP, and not in the local loop.

Bell got the nod from the regulator 3 months ago to do capacity based charging on links from the exchange to the ISP PoP. If it follows the same model as elsewhere in the world, this is usually on a wholesale, per customer basis. If the ISP in question used a 3rd party supplier then they bypass this cost. Unfortunately it appears that Bell can say no to the ISP leasing fiber capacity from exchange to PoP, which IS abusing their monopoly position.

The point is they are establishing a precedent. Even if their network is not overloaded at the moment (I suspect it's getting there) it will be soon. If a web company has to pay per GB of transit from Amazon EC2, but not within the AWS network, why should charging at a communications provider be different?
We're on it. Thanks for the help. We're putting it in right now and should be up in a few.
42 Free Psd Resources - Awesome Collection
42 Free Psd Resources - Awesome Collection
In spite of Obama being a product of such a mixed-race union, he picked 'Black' as his racial categorization in the 2010 census, according to an article linked from there.

I think that's backwards. A person equally white and equally black should not become black out of political expediency. They should be equally representative of both of their heritages.
It's never too late. I'm in my mid-thirties and just started seriously learning html & css in the past year. My hope was to leverage my background in architecture into a new sphere of design, opening up new career opportunities.

About a year into it now, I can say it's been one of the best decisions of my adult life. Learning the rudiments of even just a markup language was a real struggle, but the benefit to my 'left brain' has been tremendous. The greatest benefit however has been gaining a sense of hope from becoming even minimally skilled in a growing, relevant and potentially lucrative field.
I already get that experience by using revolutionary 19th century technology - the train.
Home Grown Entrepreneurs
I went to MIT and could not have been happier with my decision. Highest concentration of amazing people in the world IMHO (and I am proud to call a quite a few of them friends) and a huge density of inspiration. As for $100k, I went for free (c.f. financial aid) but would happily have taken out loans.

A big name school is not necessary for everyone by any means, and in fact if I had my current skills and network when I was 18 I wouldn't choose to go again (well I'd skip university altogether) but for me it was invaluable.
Google has three offices in Canada: http://www.google.com/corporate/address.html
In 2030, we still need to code exceptions for IE6 (I hope not)
This reminds me of when the Canadian RIAA (CRIA) successfully campaigned the Canadian government for a "levy" on all blank data media in 2002. They wanted to charge an extra $21 per GB on CDs, DVDs and hard drives in digital media player - ostensibly to cover the costs of piracy. Sound silly? Canadian legislators obliged (though it was overturned in court years later.)

http://news.dmusic.com/article/4580

As I recall, this backfired since the levy eventually meant that they couldn't sue people for pirating content - they had already paid for it via the levy. Like double jeopardy.

Anyway, it proved that levies like this don't actually change behaviour much. Canadians drove to the US to buy their MP3 players. Telcos benefitted by online media consumption and competed heavily for broadband subscribers. Digital lifestyles in Canada flourished.

Ironically, it's now the telcos that are complaining for the same reason. The key difference now is that big telcos can use this decision to squeeze their competitors (who they also supply.) Though I can see ways that this will backfire too.

The good thing about the Canadian government is that they have a history of continually watching, listening, adjusting and even backtracking if they feel they made the wrong move. I hope this keeps the telcos from abusing their new rights, and from stifling digital innovation in Canada, which hurts them too in the long run.
Wael Ghonim, a Head of Marketing at Google: "We are all ready to die"
I use Criticker to get recommendations and that's pretty much I need when it comes to social movie services. Also, one thing I dislike about Criticker - or IMDB or that matter - is how the lock-in my data, which basically means that I have to re-start the process of telling which movies I like and dislike each time I find a new service. Incredibly annoying and quite rude. What is Sharemovi.es policy on this?
I’m liking the widget idea. Good luck with it.
I was actually in the process of building something like this though for myself rather than as a service.

Have shot out the link, looking forward to setting it up in the lead up to our launch.
Stupid is better than smart
Spoof on US State Departments Position on Egypt - video
Traditionally, in times of unrest and disaster radio amateurs were the last to stay in touch and the first to come back in contact.

Yes, they're severely regulated and there are governmental registries of the equipment they have. But I'd still put good money on HAMs being the last links to an area engulfed in unrest or disaster.
> [criminals going free is] just as scary as violating other's rights and wrongful convictions.

I disagree. There will always be evil in the world; one criminal more or less is a drop in the bucket. What truly hurts a nation is when innocent citizens cannot be sure that their innocence will protect them from their own legal system.
oh, very interesting, thank you
Analysis of the State of the Union Address
Lunacy.
Norway is successful because of the oil and gas resources here. This makes the economy boom, and is why the welfare state and social democracy works so well. I still think the US has a far more competitive start-up environment. I'm from Norway, by the way.
I entered my email address and got this:

> Invite at least 3 friends using the link below. The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll be able to use LaunchRock!

This reminds me of facebook apps that require you to invite your friends in order to get the full functionality. I'm not a big fan of this practice.
Great idea!

Where is my e-mail going? What are you planning to do with it?

Also, there is no identification on who is running the project.
>What would stop them from simply going around this mechanism and just copy and paste the solution into their own repository?

They could have a reputation system somewhat like that on Mechanical Turk:

* You only pay someone if you like their solution.

* People working on tasks get reputation for how well they are doing.

* People offering tasks get reputation for how many people they are paying.
It will be interesting to see if urbanization of the third world will have positive impact on the environment. Better efficiency and less human intrusion on natural habitats
Even more exciting than these kids learning Ruby is that they're learning programming. After they have a grasp of the concepts of how to program a computer, they can expand to other languages (or stay with Ruby ;-)

I think programmatically controlling hardware (like robots and Lego) can be very attractive to kids, too.
In 1991 (20 years ago), DOS 5.0 was released.

In 2005 (14 years later), autonomous robotics cars successfully navigated a course in the desert. Two years later, they did the same in a city, with no traffic violations.

In 2007 (16 years later), for a few hundred bucks you could carry several orders of magnitude more computing power in your pocket, with remote access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Today, we have affordable 3D printing and are on the cusp of quantum computing. Cryogenic preservation is offered at feasible prices by multiple companies. Political revolutions happen with live commentary which is beamed through space into my pocket. Several new nanotech-based products are released to market every week. If you don't stop and look around, it's easy to miss the fact that we live in the freaking future.

That said, I'm not sure I buy that space tourism will be that big in 20 years, nor that poverty rates will be so low. But the rest don't seem outrageous at all.
Quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen on the web. And I've seen some pretty dumb things.
Wishful thinking. Having the draft did not keep us out of Vietnam (or the escalation). Eighteen yearolds have no influence on military policy and their parents buy the patriotic fervor. I am thankful that we dont have the draft and my son did not have to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. I wish it were more difficult to wage war, not easier.
Might want to make that sooner than just "in the coming days."
Is XML considered a failure? (Not being snarky, just that I find it in use everywhere.)
Sarien.net Is Back with Activision’s Approval
I paid $60 a month for catastrophic healthcare from State Farm when I ran a ramen profitable startup. My deductible was $1500. When I nearly cut my toe off walking on a beach, I had surgery, $1000 worth of antibiotics and two follow up visits. I paid a grand total of $1500 for everything. I know I'm a healthy young man, but that seemed like a pretty fair deal to me.

Amazingly this plan will soon become illegal for being too minimalist under the new healthcare laws. I get that there are real problems with healthcare in the US. But entrepreneurs are mostly healthy young men, and it doesn't cost much to insure healthy young men.
Hi. We're Chris (@chrisbaglieri), John (@codingjester), Josiah (@bluepojo), and Aaron (@aaronfeng). This company was born over the course of 54 hours at Philadelphia Startup Weekend.

The emails will be used once and only once, to announce when we're open to the public.
I think better batteries are more important than car fuel (especially since we already have cars that run on batteries).
Solar-powered medium-altitude flocking UAVs could provide a semi-temporary mesh WiFi (or sim.) network. We have flocking software. We have UAVs.

Is anyone researching solar-powered UAVs that can stay aloft for long periods of time, inexpensively?

Quick google only found this: http://www.gizmag.com/go/3891/
In the threads-about-HN category, pg's comment from 1078 days ago that upvoting to indicate agreement and downvoting to indicate disagreement with comments has its place on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I am aware that since then pg has been thinking about ways to refine the commenting system or flagging to make sure that the right incentives occur on HN to encourage worthwhile threads and comments to those. Kudos to the OP here for asking all of us to look up good examples of worthwhile content on HN.

Now the way I "bookmark" HN threads is by sharing the submitted links, with a hat-tip to HN, with my Facebook friends. Seaching the links I've recently submitted to Facebook, I see that an HN thread about science books

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110042

was quite useful and well liked.
Attempt to make some free money. Reposting on news sites is a part of the plan.
Thank you. Perhaps add that to the site and you'll give off a lot more "warm and fuzzies."
Ask HN: How do I estimate the value of my start-up?
Before meeting with investors, I want to have an estimated price of my start-up.

What factors should I take into account?
It does, but as catshirt says, that's probably reasonable. Especially as jQuery assumes a browser (and relies on the window namespace) too - so it wouldn't be suitable for a browserless environment anyway...
Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe

How does that follow? Do you expect China to surpass the US and Europe not just in absolute terms but also in per capita income by 2030?
lol wut? this literally takes 2 minutes to implement because I just did it...

http://pastebin.com/MazgLjkb
People are also willing to cede control in favour of attributes that they value more such as safety, convenience and shorter trips (in duration).
This isn't accurate. Shaw has recently jumped on the same bandwagon and started enforcing hard caps with overage fees. Just go here if you want to check that:

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Spee...

($2.00/GB for each GB used above plan’s limit)

AFAIK, Telus isn't doing yet, but I've heard that this is a technical limitation rather than lack of desire to do so.
Mestizo, typically.
The title is hyperbole, but the author makes two good points:

1. A revolution is created by people, not by technology. Calling the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia the "Twitter" or "Facebook" revolutions doesn't reflect the reality on the ground.

2. The more centralised and widely used a networking service like Twitter or Facebook is, the easier it is for governments to control it or use it to track down dissidents.

Very valid and interesting points.
For new development? Try it and see.

For a rewrite? that would be death. Don't sacrifice a product making money for a sexy new language.
Concept is reminiscent of http://unbounce.com/.

Since right now it's really just a copy of usehipster.com (as you say), it's difficult to 'rate' - what feedback are you hoping for?
Absolutely, but contrasted with say 'logo' the power of ruby is that it is not a 'toy' language, you can build just about anything other than hard real time systems in it.

That's a pretty powerful tool to master. The only other languages that I can think of that are that accessible to children are Logo, Basic and SmallTalk and none of those is as well established as a starting language for kids to use and as powerful at the same time.

The lego robotics kits are nice and well thought out but there is no stepping stone between there and say making a website or some other non lego-related program.

Robots and turtles are cool in that they allow control of real-world objects from a programming environment.
Since you can save money better, save the planet better, and avoid driving better by using (a proper designed) public transport, yes, just a crutch.
> But entrepreneurs are mostly healthy young men

Could this be at least in part a self-fulfilling prophecy? Due to the way healthcare is set up in the U.S., the only people who really can consider quitting their jobs, and losing their group-health plan as a result, are: 1) people who are already rich (or have rich family); and 2) healthy young men.

edit: Actually, I suppose people over 65 also can, due to the U.S.'s strange age-based national health system. But people over 65 tend not to be likely startup candidates for other reasons.
I wasn't among those who downvoted you, but here's my two cents:

1) I don't think the quote added anything new to the discussion. Nor was it a good summary of the article.

2) You asked a loaded question that implied a bias on the part of your listeners. You are deliberately creating a situation where discussion is impossible, since only one answer is "right". Why, then, would anyone want to engage with you?