skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it would be nice if the government could help alleviate things such as basic welfare and health care benefits. Unfortunately for the USA, we are in such a massive amount of debt that it would be impossible* for the government to do such a thing. And between health care and the military spending, we're pretty much diving deeper and deeper.

* We could do it, but I doubt that any legislators would go for such a thing.
Sometimes I really wonder what Wolframalpha is thinking.
I think the key realization is that genuinely being right is much more useful (especially in the long-run) than having others perceive you as being right in any particular debate.
> And quite a large number of people used encryption, even
> if they weren't technically inclined.

I agree with your broader point that expectations and perceptions can change fast, but I don't ever remember a time when "quite a large number" of people used email encryption. Perhaps a larger group of users then than now had a desire for email encryption.
My old boss was born and raised in France and would use that expression all the time. She thought it was funny.
This looks to me as more of an argument against democracy than anything else. Not sure how you intended it. Its definitely interesting. But what would we be if not for democracy or some other form of rule? Anarchy. I don't think that is what I want, at least. It would be back to Darwin and "Survival of the fittest".
Does not accept my valid e-mail address: http://i.imgur.com/0mGgT.png
You could look at nothing but google ads for a month and your bandwidth wouldn't be near what it'd be if you had just watched a single HD movie over netflix.
I know your point was specifically about young men, but this is one of the things that keeps women from doing startups. I'm young, healthy, female, and doing a startup, but one of my major concerns was finding a health care plan that would eventually cover maternity. Prior to the health reform law, if I'd developed any kind of condition I wouldn't have been able to switch plans, and even if I did, they often don't cover maternity for the first year.

I could afford to pay the costs of a normal birth, but my nephew's cost $300,000.
If the business is already making money, valuation is often a multiple of annual revenue. Depending on the length of the investment and your business model, this might be anywhere between 3 and 10x revenue.

I'm sure there have been a few threads on this before. Here's one of them:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785448
Why Qwiki Is The Future of Education
Thanks for setting the record straight on this. I'm Norwegian, and this is exactly what I would say about this. There are many things we do in Scandinavia that should be copied in the US, but start-up culture and small business is not helped along by the tax system and social services/benefits. In fact, the progressive taxation alone incentivizes everyone to _not_ earn more than about 100000 USD a year (if you work harder to earn more, taxation is about 45% on the marginal income).

There are "official" (state-sponsored) investment companies, but they are incredibly risk-averse and never invest in anything halfway radical. Private financing for computer startups is nonexistent.
You're getting into interesting ground here with questioning happiness. How is happiness defined? Can you truly distinguish between someone who is happy on their own and someone who is happy because their society tells them they should be? Does any happiness not stem from generations of people shaping perceptions of what individuals in their society should feel happy about?
He's talking about XML on the web, not XML in general. XML is not a failure in general (although it should be...).
"Speaking as one who has started several start-ups in Norway, I'd say: there is still quite a bit to win, there is much less risk, and at the end of the day, we're not really in it for the money, are we?"

That last part makes me think that you aren't really making that much and justifying it by saying: "we're not really in it for the money, are we?".

Everyone is in it for the money. Money means freedom. Freedom from governments and your boss. If you aren't in it for the money, start a non-profit.

Here is a list of the largest 500 companies in Norway (with gross and net revenue):

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

Those numbers look pitiful (I'm not sure what the actual dollar amounts are, but I'm just comparing them based on percentages). Having health insurance to fall back on does help with starting a company. But once you get the company established, the amount of taxes you will be required to pay for employees and other things will outweigh any benefits you received initially.
I agree that a 150 year life expectancy is very unlikely in the next 20 years, but the possibility of people who are alive in 2030 reaching 150 seems plausible. I think that's the argument de Grey was making, and their source article had confused the two issues.
And why fqwiki may be the future, too -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131563
We do that so that you can't game the system with the same email address. + are invalid.
David Frost, while not American

Every american should know David Frost, if they don't they're not american.
The point is to provide this functionality for other sites. We're using ourself to launch ourself. Once we're out of beta, you won't need to do the referrals. We think it's a good way to create hype about your new startup.
I like the concept. Could be tweaked a bit. Now for a shamefully shameless self promotional plug, filled with extra shame and shame on top: I just a built a site where startups and other businesses submit their site in order to receive fast, actionable feedback from potential customers. The kicker is that the Top Feedback providers get a cash award for their insight, keeping the comments thoughtful and motivated. I'll foot the bill on the cash award for the first 10 companies that submit for the beta launch this week! Now, wasn't that the most awful, self indulgent shame filled promotional plug, ever?

- Fred
http://feedbackfred.com
http://twitter.com/thefeedbackfred
If I told you twenty years ago that you would be able to pull a handheld device out of your pocket and access the sum of all human knowledge instantaneously that would be crazy. But wait… you can also listen to your entire music collection, or any digital music ever produced, watch movies, play complex games, read any book, have GPS tracking, take pictures, made videos, make phone calls and video calls... all on one device. I think the average person would call you insane back then.

Its easy to say now how it was bound to happen but as the recent Katie couric and gumbel clip shows they didn’t even know what the internet was in 1994! In 1990 most people didn't even have computers. Cell phones didn't even start becoming commonplace in the US until less than 10 years ago.
As we move through life gradually we don’t notice as much the continuous change that occurs all around us everyday. But if I transported you directly from 1990 to today, you better believe you would be astonished.

Humanity in general progresses at an exponential rate. More change happened in the 20th century than all of previous history. More change will probably occur in the first 25-30 years of the 21st century than the entire 20th century.

So yes, a lot of these things are possible. And other , much more interesting things we can't imagine or even comprehend now will be around in 2030, too.
"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"

Health care is a small part of it. The other part is that once you have a stable income and a family (wife+kids), most people don't want to take the risk of losing that income because the risk will have lasting effects on their entire family. When you are young and have no dependents, you can take this risk.

This is why you should get your company started first..and then settle down with a wife+kids.
Buzzword galore ;-) Reminds me of http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com/
We'd love to know what you think of it as a concept, and if you'd want to use this for your own site. Also, love to hear about any other features you'd like, other types of game dynamics that we might employ. We're trying to figure where to go from here.
The reason ATMs don't have fingerprint readers is that thieves would cut off fingers. A chip under the skin would lead to similar unpleasantness.
Spotting your own negativity is a good test, but I prefer to phrase it in more self-effacing terms, "When trying to spot all the assholes in the room, I always need to find a mirror."
Now, it's this one :)
... as in, most often-cited papers are older (taking some time to amass the citations), and effective collaboration tools only became available much later?

Also, the progress that has been made on remote collaboration (say, Skype and DVCSs versus telephone and CVS) is significant. I won't say that there is no advantage to meeting in person, regularly, but the alternative "Researchers keep high-impact work within their own lab" does sound very credible.
That graph was a useless piece of shit. I have a feeling there's a bimodal distribution there, but can't even get a feeling for it because the graph was so poorly made.

Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.
I wonder why MS found a different result when they studied the issue: Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1382...
Awesome, what's the site? I'll look out for it.
> Check the law again. The draft applies to all Israelis but exemptions can be granted. And in fact have been granted to Arabs. The conscription of Druze men is a consequence of their not having been granted a special exemption.

True but this doesn't mean non-Jewish Israelis are barred from serving in the military or civil service.

> I was not saying it was good or bad. I was citing it as evidence that different races are treated differently under Israeli law.

Right but if this is practiced in hundreds of countries around the world, it's a moot point.
What a gem. Thank you for that. Not only for the insight in it but for the bravery Fiaz had to write that all out.
I pretty much like the partial such as (map (* 2) [1 2 3]). Do you plan on adding something like (map (/ _ 2) [1 2 3]) like Arc or a #(.. % ..) clojure equivalent?
No need to consult a lawyer, just open an issue at http://support.github.com and ask if it's okay.
I believe most of these points will become reality, but some of them by 2120 not by 2020.
Fred, how do you think we could/should tweak it?
More verbose? Both are only one line statements.

The only way it's more "verbose" is because the class name is bigger.

You can use a one letter classname, if that's your problem.
That's sort of unrelated to my point, but it's an interesting question.

A corporation's rights and responsibilities just derive from the rights and responsibilities of those who own it. I think this is the premise behind "corporate personhood" and I think it works correctly almost all the time. (I'd be interested to see examples where that's not the case.) For example, a corporation can exercise free speech, because the people who own it can exercise free speech; so if you deny the corporation from exercising its free speech, you are denying those who own it their right to exercise free speech.

I'd think that in the case of personal injury caused by a corporation, if the corporation's full assets are not enough to compensate the victims, then the owners could then be held responsible to cover the difference. (Whether that is actually legally the way it works now, I don't know.)
I've always wondered about the efficacy of distributed teams. It's easy to see people all over the web that expound the virtues of not working in an office. 37signals comes to mind here, since they are always warning of how working together in an office is only distracting to productivity.

I've found it to be quite the opposite. When working together in a group, everybody seems to motivate each other and work gets done faster. That's why founders who share an apartment that doubles as an office seem to be most successful IMO (insert marriage joke here).

In the end, my guess is it just comes down to either team size or personal work style. There's no one rule that can be applied to everybody. Obviously, if you have a team of more than 20 people, being close together isn't going to make much difference since you aren't interacting with everybody anyway.

The last line regarding having people brainstorm separately is particularly interesting though:

"That’s because the problems of face-to-face dynamics go away: The “virtual” group is better."
Hi,

Matt Mickiewicz here, co-founder of 99designs.

I would highly encourage you to give us a try... the key to success with our model is engagement & feedback with the designers. We're never the absolute cheapest option (we charge minimimum $295 for a logo and there's sites like 20dollarlogos and 50dollarlogos.com out there) but what you get is the viewpoints, interpretations, and skills from a wide variety of designers.

We've done over 55,000 projects, including some awesome work for Mashable (http://mashable.99designs.com), SxSW (http://99designs.com/sxsw), the logo for StackOverflow.com, official t-shirts for the San Francisco & LA Marathons and tons of other cool projects. Even took home a Webby Award for Best Web Service in 2010.

Heck - we even did the original CrowdSPRING logo: http://99designs.com/contests/321 .

Feel free to drop us an email or call our office if you have any questions.
or you can just walk those 50-100m (average WiFi coverage area) and ask your neighbors for news.
XML is incredibly powerful, somewhat complex, and therefore misunderstood.

It needs an "Modern XML" like the "Modern Perl" that's going around - a take from someone who has used it to solve problems and goes over the bright points and black marks.

For example, to the neophyte, do you pick DTD, XML Schema, RelaxNG, or Schematron to solve data validation task X? How about task Y?

Too many people tried to use XML as a CSV or other structured data replacement, where JSON is usually superior. I doubt that anyone thinks that JSON is a HTML replacement, but XML can be.

It comes down to different tool, different job, and using the wrong tools can leave a sour taste in one's mouth about a technology - how many people here have similar feelings about Java or Windows?
that gave me a chuckle

however, i'm not frightened by anything that helps entrepreneurs
"Winning Isn't Normal"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009043
in the same thread there is - I think- a thread about Dropbox

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103
A bit too MLM for my tastes.
XML is not a failure and it's also not a failure on the web (XHTML? RDF? FOAF? &c... huge successes). OpenID also isn't a failure - it could stand to be supplanted by something better but it had to start somewhere.
Interesting summary and juxtaposition of various opinions on these technologies.

The fact that JSON has won over XML on the web says a lot about the technologies people are using to build websites these days. JavaScript client-side data processing seems to be a lot more popular than server-side processing with an XML-loving language like Java or C#.
Added a quick note about only using emails once and only once. We'll add an about page in the coming day profiling each of us.
All undemocratic Arab governments fear Al Jazeera.

ie all Arab governments and the US if they are US backed ones.

with one exception. Al Jazeera obviously never digs into the affairs of the Qatari royal family.
Human population growth peaked in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since. Current estimates are that the world population will hit its peak of about 9-11 billion by around 2050. You might not think so today, but this is a reasonable population for the earth to support by that time.
I did not know that! Unfortunately I missed it this time, but I will do that next time :)
Democracy in its pure sense is quite horrible, it's commonly referred to as mob rule. That is why modern democracies are constitutional democracies, the rule of the mob is limited so that minorities are protected.

I do believe that his line of thinking exposes flaws in democracy - it's important to identify flaws in the system so that they can be addressed.
Using Avaaz to support people of Egypt
Norway would have a lot more trouble saying "ja" to socialism if it didn't have so much oil. That's what makes the whole thing seem like such a good deal - you're getting more than you're paying in.
Horizontal Symmetry – The Way of the Future Phone?
Google already has self driving cars that can safely navigate city traffic. I would say that 20 years is plenty of time to resolve the remaining technical and social issues.
I might, probably just for the change of pace (though if you're looking for me, I'm more likely to be in the lab than in my office).
I think OpenID ran into serious trouble when a bunch of big sites announced support for it, but really only supported it as providers, not consumers.

At one point, I had something like 3 or 4 different sites I was registered on that would serve as OpenID providers for me, but not a single place that I wanted to login to accepted OpenID. At that point, I pretty much forgot about OpenID. I bet a lot of would-be early adopters did the same.

By the time I actually started occasionally encountering sites that accepted OpenID and that I wanted to use, I had 1Password and didn't care about OpenID anymore.
Out west, it is essentially the same except Telus owns most all of the phone/DSL/CDMA infrastructure, and Shaw owns all the cable infrastructure.
What? American is the official demonym for US citizens. Sorry for the confusion, but American is the only correct demonym and has been for a long time.

Edit: Actually, when is there ever any confusion? There isn't a whole lot the "Americas" as a whole have in common. If you want to do continent-based demonyms, just prefix North or South.
But just because analysis implies some point of view or bias doesn't mean it's not valuable. I'd rather get a variety of editorial viewpoints than just straight facts for which I may not have sufficient context.
break the linkage between health care and employment altogether

Policy wonks on the left and right have been shouting this from the rooftops for decades, but to no effect. The problem is that any incremental change in that direction is instantly demagogued as "taking away your existing coverage".
I agree with the two main points of your post regarding the importance of:

- being forced to learn difficult problems

- being surrounded by very smart people

In the long run it really helps to be forced to learn difficult ideas. If you aren't forced to learn them then you are unlikely to put forth the effort necessary. This is why it is a nice benefit to be in a class where they expect you to do hard problems and you have the pride to not want to let them down. As you stated, big state universities cater to a lower common denominator so the focus on difficulty is not as extreme.

Anyone that is reasonably intelligent and very self-motivated can conquer the hard problems students go through in top Computer Science programs. They can also network in a similar, although not as easy, fashion as done at top-tier universities by doing open-source. So, while a top-tier university does make things easier, it isn't a requirement. This is doubly true for Computer Science.

I do think that your experience at Microsoft was purely anecdotal as you stated. The part where those from top-tier schools were always better than those from a lower-tier is very far from a universal truth. Following that train of logic in the real world will get you burned.
That last part makes me think that you aren't really making that much and justifying it by saying: "we're not really in it for the money, are we?".

Bad guess. My first startup had a successful exit; I'm not at liberty to discuss the numbers, but let's just say that it was for a satisfying amount with the appropriate number of zeroes.

Everyone is in it for the money. Money means freedom. Freedom from governments and your boss. If you aren't in it for the money, start a non-profit.

I'm not purely in it for the money; I'm in it for the quality of life. After a certain point, each additional dollar/kroner fails to significantly impact the quality of life. Similarly, there are plenty of things I absolutely won't do for money.

Having health insurance to fall back on does help with starting a company. But once you get the company established, the amount of taxes you will be required to pay for employees and other things will outweigh any benefits you received initially.

Again, wrong. I also received some very generous innovation grants from the Norwegian government. The benefits were plentiful.
Not to be too pedantic, but the Eastern European "refolutions" were made possible because a) the Soviet Union and b) local Communist governments simultaneously made the decision not to use force.

Those decisions (and their publicity) were a necessary condition; it's what made the difference between 1956, 1968 and 1980 on the one hand, and 1989 on the other.

It will be a long and dark road for Egypt if Mubarak can successfully order the military to slaughter the protesting masses. The revolution will fail, both the government and the opposition will lose credibility in the eyes of the people and it will be years or decades of strict martial law.
Download Pencil Application for Linux, Windows and Firefox
My anecdote was...anecdotal. Nonetheless Canada's broadband deployment rates are in the top quarter of the OECD, and it regularly ranks very well in bandwidth in the same comparisons. Empirically Canada isn't doing so terrible.

Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure

Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't even have the technical ability to do anything to restrict or harm them.

The situation here is that Teksavvy has access to bulk wholesale Nexxia (Bell's backbone) rates that were forced upon Bell by the CRTC. Again, this was an agreement that was established when Bell was overwhelmingly dominant in certain areas of Canada. If those wholesale rates are "fair", however, then clearly Teksavvy can just arrange with another provider to handle that service. The reason they can't, of course, is that the rates they were paying were essentially monopoly subsidized.
What's the best way to read mailing lists in 2011?
The first one is a knapsack problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem

The third on is Zero-sum problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum

Nor sure about the second one. Anyone who knows?
From the UK as at 21:25 GMT the EFF site seems to have completely disappeared...
But satellites would also likely be controlled by entities subject to government pressure. (Perhaps a different government than the one in control of the local territory, but whichever, it won't always be in sympathy with the people on the ground.)

Tight-beam directional laser is an interesting idea, but does require a fair amount of advanced setup and calibration. And the base stations would still be vulnerable to detection if they're transmitting to something else that isn't tight-beam, like mobile handsets.

Perhaps balloon-based relay stations in the stratosphere, or solar-powered drones, which could be deployed without the expense of a satellite launch?

It is indeed a very hard problem.

EDIT: Further discussion, both on base stations and alternatives (packet radio, and the severe limitations thereof) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158111