skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to fall down your slippery slope, and either not insure or charge very high rates to people who deliberately put their health at risk.

In general, a good regulatory scheme internalizes externalities (i.e., make polluters pay for the pollution they cause). If we force people who take care of their health to subsidize people who don't, we are externalizing an internality. That's the opposite of what good regulations should do.
Even though the chosen current title is at a first read catchy it really does injustice to the article. I would suggest you to put the superficially boring titile of the original:

"The strengths of the academic enterprise"
Joseph Bates: let computers make some mistakes
Where did Siegler actually say that? I think we are reading different articles.

I also don’t understand what this whole margin-profit justification talk is all about. It’s just a consequence – not a justification – of lower margins that a company can have less profit than another company despite having higher revenue.

A question for you: Has Apple been getting closer to Microsoft’s profits during the last years or would you see that as a mischaracterization?

Also: Why am I getting downvoted?
The NSA would fund them out of the tiniest portion of the "black budget" if needed.

It's all about the data-mining...look at how Facebook is valued so highly vs. MySpace due to better data-mining capabilities (at least I think that is part of their value over MySpace)
This is going to suck, software gets bloated far faster than network hardware can be developed and certainly faster than network hardware can be installed.

New services such as Netflix and who knows what else is coming down the line (3D Netflix movies?) are going to use up your overpriced bandwidth faster than your ISP can evolve, they'll just charge more for the same service.

This will be like when video became popular when everyone was still on 56kbps modems, the web developed faster than the hardware meant to use it and it will stall development. Why develop when there isn't anyone using it or able to use it?

In the end people will do what they have to when they only have a limited amount of disposable income, ISPs will see people spend $50 for 10Mbps service and when the ISPs increase the monthly bill by a $1 here and a $1 there (to serve us better) consumers will get the 5Mbps service for $50.
Ah, finally someone said it:

>> you, the ubiquitous tech evangelist, larger-than-life personality and Rackspace blogger,
Straw man. By buying health insurance as a healthy young man you are essentially voluntarily taking on those costs.

It is not a question of whether she wants others to fit the bill for her medical expenses, but whether society as a whole decides to accept an amount of responsibility for the health of its people.
ATM Skimmers That Never Touch the ATM
saw that, but I still think my point about him pushing his own book is valid.
(but honestly, to maintain coverage with inflation it was overdue) I have to disagree.

Prior to the increase there was $100,000 of coverage. In 1934 when the program was started there was $2,500 of coverage. After adjusting for inflation this $100,000 (2011) would be worth $6,055.12 (1934). [1]

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100%2C000+in+1934
If you're going to use the HN source, use the updated version: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar

It actually might be the easiest thing to set up.
Oh like PowerPC?
I have used Symfony for my last few projects. I'm happy with the way the framework is designed, and it's quite longstanding. Another benefit is the templating is done using pure PHP, so you don't have to learn a new templating language for loops, etc. A new version (v2.0) is due to come out later this year.

The introductory documentation and tutorial are excellent. The Jobeet tutorial walks you through how to create an entire application, with the Symfony developers' best practices being implemented right from the start.

Only con: I do have trouble at times finding answers to the obscure questions I have. There seem to be a lot of forum threads about Symfony, but not quite so many answers. If you can find an experienced Symfony developer, I highly recommend talking to them and getting a few pointers in the right direction. That said, I think it's a great framework, a little on the old side in terms of style, but still quite flexible.
There are a lot of hidden arguments that you can use that the Facebook API doesn't document. There are also undocumented properties of the FB object in JavaScript. This is especially true with fbml, which still lets you do some things the new API doesn't document. Just try to create an fb:request-form dynamically in a popup over flash - that's standard in many fb games and requires undocumented tricks.
How to Make Go Programs Generic
Works great. Easy way to access and download files to iPhone. Doesn't play mp4 though
I would imagine that this is the reason Apple likes to sit on a huge pile of money instead of giving it to investors. Any supplier that tries to put the hard word on Apple knows that they risk Apple massively investing in a competitor to get another source for components. Apple already has all of the silicon design know-how in house, I don't think they would have trouble finding another supplier if Samsung decided to be difficult.
Wow, same as everyone, I'm most productive at night until morning.
Looks like a very extensive platform, great to see another major company open-sourcing their product. For me, the key question now is what level of support will be offered (by Ebay and/or the general developer community). Once this project achieves a bit of momentum from other companies' implementations I can see it presenting a very viable option for larger-scale deployments.
Any idea for starting up a start-up without core computer skills
Hi Guys,

I want to have my own start-up/idea. I believe I have a great idea which needs to be implemented by web programming skills which I am lack of. I am wondering how could I start my own start-up with knowing limited knowledge or experience abut web programming. I have been thinking hiring some web developers to carry out my project. But this idea could be easily realized by people with a lot of web programming/developing skills. How could I make sure they will not scoop my idea.
Or in another way, how should a person start a start-up without knowing too much about computer/web programing? Thanks.
> Apple's also paying for the treadmill-running through their suppliers (unless they're getting chips at a loss, which I doubt).

Yes, but Apple does not bear the entire economic cost of the treadmill, only a portion of it. The rest is borne by other customers of Intel, TMSC, Samsung and the like.

The fact is that Apple can almost certainly get a better deal from being fabless than trying to vertically integrate a cost centre that will be as large as their entire current cash flow. That's the beauty of gains from trade.

> Also I think that, in the long term, Apple is trying to move away from Intel.

Maybe. Maybe not. They moved to Intel in the first place because IBM weren't interested in their business any more. The fab runs for Macs were too small and Apple wasn't enjoying the economies of scale that Intel could offer because it sells chips to many companies.
Thanks, I feel honored to have the name added to the HN FAQ. :)
githacking left me with the impression that it was an official github thing, because of the octocat.
You're not offering any real evidence for your side, so it seems pretty arrogant to expect anyone to give you any credence. You claim it "works better than anything else," while citing a country that has brought a fraction of its population out of absolute squalor by abandoning communist ideology — that is very specious.
The experience of picking fruit is rather different for middle-class European kids and poor Mexican kids/parents/old folks. Two salient differences, among many: middle-class European kids can at any time stop picking fruit and resume being middle-class Europeans, and there is no outcome to middle-class European fruit picking which reads "fruit picker's family goes hungry."

I was not exactly thrilled with the experience of my old day job, and complained about it frequently, but never at church. Odds are on any given day I would be sitting next to at least one guy who did about as many hours at one third the pay working in a factory for people who treated him as a necessary reagent in an industrial process. Heck if I'm going to say "Waily waily I was in my air conditioned office yesterday at 1:30 AM when I could have been at home playing PS3."
You can watch some about Aliens, Bermuda Triangle, Conspiracy theories, Pyramids.
Freescale have gone fabless, I believe.
Ask HN: Is anyone hiring tech interns for the summer?
My university has their career fairs in a week. Are there any companies looking for summer interns or new grads? Working for an energetic startup would be way cooler than ending up at a monolithic company here in the Midwest.
"The Cloud Development Environment"
If you're asking yourself this question and currently work on BigCo, you might consider working for a startup first, as opposed to founding one. In the Bay Area, startups pass their series A round provide comparable salary and benefits to BigCo jobs. You won't get as much equity or exposure to as many of the ups-and-downs, but making the transition from BigCo to a 30 person company is a big jump.

I quit my BigCo job 2 weeks before my wedding to join a friend's startup as employee 20-something, quit after 18 months, and then joined my current startup as employee #1. With each move, my risk tolerance increased alongside my confidence that I wouldn't die. It has been almost a 4 year process (and still going), but I feel much more prepared now than I would have been in the summer of 2007
"It's also the country in the world with one of the highest suicide rates."

I wouldn't really call 36th "one of the highest", this is a myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
Unfortunately this measuring method could discourage the people from downloading and thus could affect the measurable quantity.
Resonates very well :)
> I would imagine that this is the reason Apple likes to sit on a huge pile of money instead of giving it to investors.

Most investors want share price growth, not dividends, because in general taxes on capital gains are lower than those on income. Stockpiling cash has a positive or neutral effect on share prices. Paying it out in dividends merely annoys those who would prefer the price to go up.
TBH, I don't even think of failure - I just know that I have to build stuff. Even in cases of failure, I never really feel like I've lost anything, and it's especially true when I'm building things for me instead of trying to get rich quick.

Perhaps this quote sums it up:

"I don't build in order to have clients, I have clients in order to build."

The startup is my client.
In order for a decentralized information network to take off it has to have a killer app other than the one that the activists like. Most people don't care about privacy in practice. They say that they do if you ask them but they won't do a damn thing to protect it. The same with freedom of speech.

In order for a technology to become mainstream there has to be an obvious, immediate benefit.

Piracy comes to mind, but the ISP's haven't cracked down enough yet for that to be a major enough issue.

Bandwidth caps could also be a prod, but I don't think people would be any more annoyed with those than the inevitably higher latency (between geographically disparate people) of a distributed network.

And then there's the bootstrapping problem.
Actually I'm not.
http://www.channelcanada.com/Article5436.html
Some ISPs are not using UBB, nor have plans to implement it.

http://internet.bell.ca/index.cfm?method=content.view&co...

oh and here's an article talking about people being on 1 2 or 3 year contracts for bell internet. How could they be on contracts if no one has them?
This is amazing, I wonder if most of the process could be automated and sold as a kit.
Can somebody explain this pricelist to me:

www.nooradsl.com/pricing.htm

What does "L.E" mean? Is it Egyptian Pounds?

And what is the speed? 512Mb cannot be 512 mega bit per second, right?
Vitriol, self aggrandization - all over an issue that doesn't seem to matter much.
As HN: Any YC startup that isn't software?
I'm not interested in applying for a company that doesn't write software, but can anyone think of YC startups outside software, and, even more broadly, outside the "technology" space?

I ask because of:

Do you only fund startups that write software?
We'll consider startups in any field, but odds are better for startups writing software, because that's what we understand.
So The Economist was originally against the PhD and now they're against the MBA. What's with the anti-postgraduate rant? I guess they'll claim physicians don't need an MD next.
"... There have been so many articles about innovations in the energy sector that went absolutely nowhere in practice ..."

check out LinkVolt ~ http://www.lincvolt.com/lincvolt_lincvoltgazette & at the SEMA address the week before the fire (vid) ~ http://www.shakeypictures.com/NYatSEMAlongvers10_12_10.html
What about natural disasters? certainly these sorts of technologies would be useful in Katrina, tsunami, Haiti-type situations, no? Maybe the sort of things that could just be air-dropped over a wide area. Ideally, you'd want the components to be redundant and sufficiently cheap as to be disposable.
If it is then it's a pretty good trick. You only need one good one. Google's revenue isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Jobs got burned at NeXT in that he spent a huge amount of money on a highly automated, top of the line, assembly system; then due to under-utilization of that system, was never able to be profitable.

Far better to realize that Samsung, TSMC et al. will be able to have better pricing, since they can keep their fabs busy with multiple customers, with no sunk costs.
Could posts also include location? I'm in the northeast, and I'm sure others would like to be able to skim for locations without leaving the page as well.
Thanks for saying it.
The powerpc chips they make are microcontrollers.
"When a professor is no better than James Martin, he should start a business instead". ouch.
The battle pictures thing seems a lot like http://www.facemash.com.au/
> I've said this to enough bosses that, this is a huge appeal for me. If you check my performance reviews they all list "has a problem with authority".

I dont understand why you are seeing it as a positive thing? Do you think entrepreneurs dont have to answer to authority?
Wow. Nevermind. It's hard to imagine that Motorola (or its spinoffs) isn't fabbing microprocessors anymore, but it looks like that's the case.
For anyone like me who didn't recognise the term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
The research is probably best applied to what it studied, producing 'influential' research papers.

It could well be that the papers were more 'influential' because with having the team co-located it got enough notice within the network to gain popularity. What I mean by this is that with 5 people in a concentrated area talking about a paper that it got to the 'front page' of what academics in the area were working on.

It's like saying teams work better closer because those teams got more links to the front page of HN because they each upvoted the story enough to get it on the front page where it could gain enough votes to stay.
>"Apple has grown faster than Microsoft in the past which means that if nothing changes, they are going to overtake Microsoft’s profits sooner or later."

Not only is Siegler not an analyst, he is not a logician either. Growth is a measure of the rate of change. Were there to be no change, there would be no growth and Microsoft's profits would continue to be greater than Apple's for so long as there was no change.

Siegler's shortcoming as journalist is not a tendency to poorly support his arguments, it is the utter lack of an argument in the first place. The piece is solely an apology for Apple. That this is appropriate for a tech blog, does not excuse the fact that Siegler wrote another piece of Apple fluff.
I've never heard of the "Polaris Circle" before. That is unbelievably cool.
I do Time Machine over AFP, but a more interesting tutorial would be Time Machine over iSCSI+SSH. In fact, that might make for a fun project next weekend.
Actually just to be clear and to make sure I don't sound like an ignorant European with some sort of MSM superiority complex, the British media is also pretty bad. The BBC is not exactly completely impartial - compare coverage of the BP oil spill on the BBC to CNN and you'll see some obvious differences.

In the UK we get BBC News, Sky News (owned by the same guy that owns Fox, and just as fair and balanced), Russia Today (which is hilarious to watch sometimes because of the blatant pro-russian bias) and Al-Jazeera, as well as some minor news programmes on other channels. All of them have their own bias to at least some extent, some greater, some worse. The trick is spotting where the bias lies and compensating for it.

It's even worse with newspapers here in the UK - have a look at http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/

Of course, the most transparent newspaper in the UK appears to be the Daily Sport. They don't really care about news, just sport and topless women. (http://www.sundaysport.com/ - warning, NSFW)
You don't know anyone who would admit to minding, true.
I think you're on to something with the extroverts, particularly that extroverts would be more likely to work closer together and for this study be more likely to talk up their paper to a large number of people.
"Barely" is in the title of the article.
Featurestage brings revolutionary consolidation and people-first connectivity
COLUMBUS, OHIO (January 31, 2011) - The cloud is friendlier than ever with revolutionary consolidation and people-first connectivity. Featurestage is built on the idea that easy and convenient collaboration will lead to more of ideas becoming reality. You might even change the world.

The first demonstration of this magical and revolutionary community comes in the form of issue tracking software-as-a-service (SaaS). This change management solution exemplifies the Featurestage platform focus of community, simplicity, and removal of limits. Over time, applications will be added to the platform to advance our mission to build a universally accessible community and engage it in pursuit of common good.

Such breakthroughs come at a cost. Featurestage offers an annual role-based concurrent Producer license for $540 or less. An unlimited Consumer license can be added for an additional $900 per concurrent Producer license. For developers or enterprise customers that seek to build on the Featurestage platform, a throttle and fee free web services API is also being launched. This same API serves as the base for current and all future applications.

The good news is that there will be no charges during the beta period. Accept this offer, try the service during the beta period, and voice your opinion. All who sign up will automatically be connected with the Featurestage project, so submitting defect correction and enhancement requests is a snap.

Those interested in learning more about Featurestage can visit https://featurestage.com.

About Featurestage Inc.
Featurestage (Twitter: @featurestage) enables collaboration with any number of projects, from any number of organizations, with a single account. This issue tracking service combines the ability to search, view, and communicate with all projects from a single view. Storage limits have been eliminated, granting freedom to provide all the information needed for even the most complex projects.

Contact:
Brian Curtis, Founder
twtr: @featurestage

###
Actually I think the bigger problem with what I said is that the huge one-trick companies I mentioned (all in mining/oil) are insensitive to competition. The market can easily support a large number of mining/oil companies, all plugging away steadily on their own bits of dirt.

Google, on the other hand, is the dominant search engine mostly because it's the best, and if anyone ever develops one that's significantly better then Google can have its lunch eaten quite quickly.
AMD is also fabless.
New York City's future that never was
Are you implying that Google's revenue is a tiny portion of the NSA's black budget? This is sounding a little bit like conspiracy theorist territory here.
How India’s SnapDeal plans to beat Groupon at its own game
WikiLeaks Founder Assange on 60 Minutes
Ask HN: Generating content and Bringing Users to website
When you build a website (for example, a site to connect sellers with buyers) which mostly relies on user generated content, how do you tackle with the below situation?

"User will not be coming to your site when there's less/no content. But, Content will not be generated when there's less/no user."

What would be the approaches to grow content/user base?
Governments Go Online in Fight Against Terrorism
It depends where you draw the line. Does Carwoo count as being in the software business?
If you do random assignment, and save the random assignments somewhere, then you can also get reproducibility. If you do random assignment, and don't save the random assignments anywhere, then you have no idea how many people were in your test versions. Which is not a good idea. (You can estimate this data. I've done it. But doing it properly is surprisingly tricky. It is very, very easy to do it wrong.)

There are several benefits to this approach.

The first benefit is that if you're testing a particular page, you can easily make your test only include people who have hit that page. This will cause results to converge more quickly than if you don't know which people on your site actually hit that page.

The second, and sometimes critical, benefit is that you know exactly when someone entered the test. Multiple times when testing things with a longer sales cycle I've encountered the situation where a particular test version causes the sales cycle to become compressed, but may or may not provide a long-term improvement in conversion. Access to data about when people entered your test allows you to examine A/B test results only for people who have been in the test long enough to be likely to have completed either version.

A third benefit is that if you're testing multiple versions, then you can just continue the test and drop poorly performing versions as you prove that they are suboptimal.

The downside, as you say, is that the map of who is in what version can get very large. In my experience, though, the access patterns are not that bad. Particularly not if you are already using sessions, and can cache that information in the current session, so that most page hits don't have to fetch the A/B test version. Furthermore this is not data that you need to join to anything else on your live website. Therefore it is a perfect candidate to move somewhere like Redis.
That's the rub. Google's trick was created by a bunch of CS grad students at Stanford, and annihilated Yahoo! (who had a very similar trick) in less than a decade. One of Google's biggest competitors was started by an undergrad in his doom room at Harvard.

The barrier to entry on the web is incredibly low in comparison to other industries. There are thousands of other people ready to eat your lunch, and it only takes one to bring everything toppling down.

I think Google's previous attempts at monetization, like the swiss cheese Google box for your intranet, Google Apps, etc. were decently good ideas. Google now seems hell-bent on open-source, in the hope of drawing more eyeballs onto the one trick. As awesome as the self-driving cars are, I'd worry about trying to find some cash flow on something a bit closer to home.
Brutal honesty doesn't push things forward any faster than honesty.