skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's funny, but I'm not sure it's true. Your first link seems to say (it's worded awkwardly) that Japanese women in the US have a 84.5 year life expectancy. This isn't quite as high as the 85.66 life expectancy Japanese women have in Japan (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...)

That's despite people of Asian descent in the US having higher income and education than the average, both of which are positively correlated with life expectancy.

Even if it is true, I'm not sure what the significance would be. I would be surprised if you couldn't pick out many subgroups in the US which do better in the US than in their places of origin, without it supporting an argument about the quality of the overall system.
IPhone versus iPhone: Ars puts Verizon and AT&T to the test
JavaScript Game Subleerunker (SUBERUNKER parody)
Co-Founder Wanted for BackupMyTweets
If you used an opamp sweep for one of the rastering dimensions (probably the horizontal), wouldn't that free up one of the DACs so you could use it for the shading?
The context I was speaking is projects who still want to support 2.x, which is what most projects want.

Obviously, if you don't care about supporting 2.x at all once the conversion is done, modifying the output and using the output as your reference source is fine.
Child Abuse Essay
Child abuse is a subject which will spark much debate. Therefore, students who are assigned the essay should tread carefully on this matter. They will be able to provide the readers with profound knowledge about child abuse and how it can be prevented.
Corporate taxes come out of paychecks. Unless all that is refunded if that's their income, then they're still paying something for it in addition to their direct monthly bill.

It can be carried further: money they get refunded comes out of other areas' funding, as the difference gets made up somehow. Their property taxes go up, the cost of food goes up because others are carrying a heavier burden, jobs across the board pay less / hire fewer, everything always costs something, even refunds. Less in some situations, but not zero. And we're still not reaching $50-$100.
I'm complaining about escapistmagazine, not the poster. I am interseted in the update. But...

Headline:

PS3 Hacker Raised All the Legal Funds Needed to Beat Sony in a Weekend

Less than one paragraph away.

... as he received enough money for the first phase of defense in about 18 hours.
Yep, that's coming very soon! We'll keep HN updated :-)
For types of employment which are often for-hire or hourly (think plumbers, electricians, etc.), unions typically offer group insurance for their members.

It would be nice if there were a similar union for tech entrepreneurs and startup employees... although maybe companies would become worried that such a union would start trying to negotiate for concessions from employers.
Ask HN: How much commission would you offer?
This is my first post, but I've been an avid reader and learning from this site for a while. I'm posting now because I've had an interesting situation come up. Due to the situation being a little sensitive, I can't be too specific. My business partner and I have been working on an interesting mobile app and website that we launched this past weekend with one customer. We knew before going live that our particular market was going to be all over what we're doing. We got "lucky" and that is in fact what happened. Therefore, now we're trying to deal with next steps and react as quickly as possible.

We've already been approached by an industry insider who says we shouldn't worry about selling to customers, but should be more focused on selling what we've built to a large entity that would like to own our product. He's certain that he can help us make that happen quicker than I would've ever imagined. It seems like a stretch, but I actually think he's right because of the response we've had. I need to come to some sort of financial agreement with this industry insider on what share he would receive if he helps us sell the company/product to one of these big players. I've never done this before and was thinking something along the lines of 10-15%. It's our idea and we've done all the work. He's just introducing us to people that can evidently throw a fair share of money at us. I'm interested to hear what people think the appropriate rate would be for his service or am I going at this in the wrong way?
Jim Kazanjian’s Innovative Architecture Designs
It seems that the inventor of object-oriented programming was one of those skeptics. Alan Kay apologized for his poor choice of words, for the resulting confusion, and for the widespread misapplication of his ideas.

http://bexhuff.com/2007/10/to-paraphrase-im-sorry-i-invented...

Unfortunately, many of today's common practices sound a lot like his description of how the term object-oriented is often misapplied. Most programmers that I have met still misunderstand object-oriented programming, and use it as an excuse for complicated or bloated code.
That is a very cool and well-done app for 6 hours.

I'm not a big twitterer (sp? lol) but this makes me wonder if there are similar apps that do pretty much the same thing but allow you to specify your focus (e.g., #wiunion)... I mean I'm sure there are but how well-done are they? And what's the proper terminology?
One of the rare instances where we might be better served with a title different from that of the article. Even Matt Dillon probably wouldn't suggest U-Verse is a "complete failure" for normal people.

U-V (I hate this name) is AT&T's high-speed service; it's FTTN (fat pipe to a DSLAM in the alley) 10-15mb over phone copper. It's a triple-play service (you get your TV and phone over it). I know a bit about it because, uh, I have it.

Dillon is pissed because the U-V router/firewall, which you can't really replace, is so bad that it breaks power user configurations. He's right, it does. BitTorrent also chokes it (yay!). I can add other problems: the set-top boxes are flaky, the reliability isn't awesome, customer service is atrocious.

On the other hand: it is f-a-s-t and cheap. I had Comcast before it, and before that I had Speakeasy (who I'd been loyal to since before the Best Buy takeover until I couldn't ignore the terrible performance anymore). I wouldn't go back to any of them. I hear good things about Vzn's fiber service, but in Chicago, I think AT&T is the best available bet.
It most certainly would, and you'd probably want to do the vertical sweep as that's the slowest.
"More importantly, the 'price fixing' approach to health insurance simply isn't going to happen in the US."

Why wouldn't it? Would there be riots in the streets? Roving gangs of healthcare-affiliated hooligans throwing rocks, burning patient effigies? Doctors lining up to leave the country en masse for a freer medical marketplace or just throwing dirt in the eye of medicine to go be a quant trader at a hedge fund?

The more important question is: Why hasn't that happened worldwide, in places where there truly _is_ universal/free/government healthcare?

"What parts of it do you think we really can adopt? Because nobody is going to fix US healthcare by fiat."

And, nobody but the rich and upper-middle class will be able to afford healthcare by Market. We can already see that today, with over 50 million uninsured Americans, up from 37 million just two years ago. How many will it be next year?
For different data point, I'm ecstatic about U-verse here. It's definitely the fastest, most-stable residential Internet connection I've had. I know that some cable service and things like FiOS are faster, but U-verse is the fastest thing available to me here in the 'burbs.

I believe I do have a different router/modem than he's describing though. Mine's a 2Wire that doesn't seem to be as invasive. My only gripe is that it doesn't support 802.11n.
You're not encouraged that there's price competition in health care, or you don't believe that there's price competition in health care?
I have previously used the subscription-less http://payperfax.com

Anything I should know to make me use hellofax? (20 free faxes is definitely a nice start!)
Yes please, I love reading posts like this... it makes me motivated to learn more about these software!
And breaking a window stimulates the economy because it means the window-fitter gets more business.
You can do that with your website.
Who needs spotify for that?
We're great for when you need to fill-out or sign a document. You can upload it (we support all common file types), sign it, fill it in, and fax it within minutes. Much faster than printing, signing, and scanning.

I hope you get to give it a try soon. Let us know what you think!
I think the goal was more to state that our government is heavily influenced by rich special interest groups, who won't let it happen here, even if it costs them billions of dollars every year to fight it off.

Funny mental picture though :D In my head they're wearing those stereotypical nurse hats and brought their own stretchers to carry off the wounded / exhausted / weaponry.
If the casual user has to ever receive a fax, then I don't see how to get around a subscription, after all, you have to have your own fax number to receive a fax, right? There isn't some technology by which users could share a number and use an extensions as a discriminator, right?
No, there won't be riots in the streets, because it would take amendments to the Constitution to institute price-fixed health care. Clinton's wildest single-payer fantasy (which, coincidentally, is one of my wild fantasies) would be easier to accomplish, and it, too, is D.O.A.

My objection to your point is twofold:

(1) It is total wishful thinking.

(2) It's wishful thinking in the face of pragmatic solutions that could resolve the problems we have now without utterly restructuring the market for health care.†

I'd also appreciate it if you wouldn't attempt to frame any critique of your comments in terms of "you're either with me or against health care reform". As you can see from a casual glance at this vast, Reddit-like thread, few opponents of health care reform would dare poke their head up on HN these days. I'm not an opponent of reform.

† Recap of my wish list: mandatory guaranteed-issue private high-deductable health insurance, an exchange-type system that fosters 5+ insurers in every major market (up from the 2 we have today), and broad adoption of cost-cutting services like telemedicine-issued scripts and nurse-practitioner clinics.
Sorry - I was joking. Perhaps I should have added a smiley. I get what you're saying. I also think that:

1. the medical industries/professions work very hard at discouraging price competition.

2. price competition is not sufficient to create a healthcare marketplace that works well for society. I'd like to see people without means have at least some access to medical technology/services, even at the cost of inefficiency. But that's just me.

Like I said - it's a beast.
And the display technology. And the sensing circuits. And the pixel moving hardware. And the device interchange standards. None of which Corning makes.

It's comforting to know that in the near future we're all so stupid that we need in-car navigation to find our way to the office each morning.
The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect
Punctuation is generally ignored in searches (some exceptions: _, +, $ and # in limited contexts, e.g. "C++", "$1000000" and "F#"; the calculator; word separators, e.g. "a=b", "a/b", "a}b", etc.; Google Code Search)

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
I just tried that out. Online PDF form filling, signing, and saving would be a worthwhile product in itself in my opinion.

Edit: And of course there are a couple of those sites already (just for forms). All of which could use some polishing.
Some confusion is to be expected. After all, a lot of the concepts are pretty tough to comprehend cleanly.
What did he suggest? Has he done this before, and if so what were the terms?

FWIW 10-15% is about right from the few cases I have direct knowledge of, but it depends a lot on the final deal size and terms.
Instead of protesting change, adjust your own career
I hate being given questions with ambiguity and not enough context to answer them, and then getting it "wrong". It's fine if you want to test my thinking processes, but make the question about listing my assumptions and reasoning rather than expecting a single empirically-derived answer.

The next item in the sequence could justifiably be 31, or 1111, or 121, or 0004, or 100. Given an ambiguous question, I'm going to take the less clever answer which is more readily supported by the most common assumptions (y = (x-1) * 10 + 1, as the problem appears to be presented as a numeric sequence and the entire world counts in base 10). In programming, any undocumented assumptions should be blindingly obvious. Anyone that works on a system with unobvious and undocumented assumptions is playing software Russian roulette.

If the kind of person you want to hire is the kind of person who comes up with unobvious, esoteric solutions to problems, I'm not sure I want to be working on your software team anyhow.
People who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing)

Testing as a whole is not an easy task as it involves testing some really hard things: memory leaks, performance, UX, correctness of parallel and distributed algorithms/programs/systems.

However, Wealthfront engineers probably put this position more into perspective [1]:

We do not have QA team and do not want to have one, the reasoning is that if a human is involved in testing then there is a higher chance of missing things and you simply can't test all the site dozens of times a day.

Granted, Wealthfront uses continuous deployment[2], while still being regulated by the SEC. I really enjoy their lean startup approach to minimize inventory (ie: code not in production), while still keeping an immune system. And investors seem to agree it is really paying off [3].

[1] http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/04/findbugs-husdon-and-pizza...

[2] http://www.eishay.com/2010/07/continuous-deployment-at-kachi...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/kaching-gets-100m-under-man...
The one thing that pg does not mention in the essay during company formation having vesting is crucial. I guess everybody knows that by now...
This seems like a particularly insane time for Apple to risk losing subscription apps like Netflix, Evernote, Kindle, etc. What with Android sells now far out-pacing iPhone sales and WP7 making a fair attempt at getting lets under itself.

IMHO, they could have pulled this off a year or 2 ago because developers had nowhere else credible to turn. Now, they do.
Microsoft started to help the Samba team because of a lawsuit, not because they felt like being nice to OSS:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps...
Freelancersunion.com I believe does something similar with their health plan.
0%. Go build some value. You'll make the connections you need as you go if you're successful - and it sounds like you're off to a good start.

Even if you chose to sell, 10-15% is too high. Investment bankers charge less. Someone might happily sit on your board of advisors for less than 1% and provide the same service.
Congrats on the launch! HelloFax is a fantastic product, and an excellent example of launching an MVP when you have just enough features to make some group of users very happy.

The ability to sign documents within the app alone has been an incredible time saver. It makes you think "How is this not the default way to send faxes yet?"
Eight years later, it's easy to read an article and empathize with him. But if someone sent me an email that said, "I kinda stole your multi-million dollar source code, but really do like you and want to be friends." I would not be very trusting.
"instead of doing anything serious about it, we've done almost the worst possible option: require every one of us to be a customer of these monstrous companies, with little regulation on cost or other government oversight"

This is a common misunderstanding of the economics of this situation. The principle involved here is "Adverse Selection".

To illustrate, let's look at automobile liability insurance. The reason this insurance is so affordable for most americans is that 1) everyone with a car must pay it and 2) there is price competition among insurers.

Imagine for a moment that automobile liability insurance was optional. Who would benefit the most from having this insurance? Accident-prone drivers or non-accident-prone drivers?

That's right - the accident-prone drivers.

And since accident-prone drivers have the most incentive to have liability insurance, you would see the customer pool of the insurance start skewing heavily towards these high-risk drivers.

Then, since it's mostly the high-risk drivers in the customer pool, the number of claim payouts would go dramatically up along with the average payout per claim.

In order for the insurance company to remain in business they would be forced to raise their rates OR to be super strict about not insuring customers that seem risky.

Naturally, the insurance business only works if you have more money coming in than going out. And in order for the insurance to be "affordable" to most people, then the risk needs to be spread amongst most people (not just the more risky ones).

So, while I understand and share your frustration at the current state of health care in the U.S. - it's important to point out "why" everyone needs to be insured in order for the rates to be "affordable".

Of course there are other important variables affecting health insurance premium rates (rising health care costs is a major one), but the "Adverse Selection" issue is probably the most important.

-----

Another point to consider is that the current big health insurance companies have focused their skill on just a couple things:

1. Avoiding risky customers (by denying them or offering only super-high premiums)

2. Paying out as little as possible (by reducing health care costs and denying claims)

The dynamics of the health insurance market are about to be dramatically changed. #1 will no longer be nearly as important and there will be a huge jump in the size of the market. This will be a huge opportunity for disruption in the industry.

The old health care companies are extremely slow, bloated, and resistant to change. It's easy to see that new entrants will be able to grab significant market share from them and initiate some real price competition.

It's frustrating to have to wait the few years until this happens, but I'm very optimistic about the future (assuming the recent health care reforms won't be diluted before they can be enacted).
Some of the police brutality comes down to poor decision-making due to poor training and little experience. I never saw it that way until I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. There's a chapter where he discusses an incident in New York where cops shot up an innocent guy. The analysis was that in high-pressure situations, the mind ceases to function and focuses purely on survival and sustaining one's self. One becomes essentially autistic in being unable to recognize social signs such as facial expressions, body movements, etc, and the outcomes when weapons are in play are often gruesome.

It was quite an enlightening read, and I think I take it seriously because my own experience in high pressure situations. First was a time when I was taking a walk with my dad and some kids surrounded us. One tried to spray pepper spray in my face from behind, but my dad saw he was doing something so yelled at him, and my dad got sprayed instead. Then they all ran. I was stunned and couldn't process what was going on; really, I was just so focused on the guy in front of me, my decision-making process was paralyzed.

My second was when I was the venue technology manager for Cypress Mountain at the Vancouver Winter Olympics (freestyle skiing and snowboarding). In terms of operational pressure, that was the most difficult thing I ever experienced, and even more so because Cypress was literally the most difficult and complicated venue of the Olympics. There were situations where my brain literally just shut down and I was going 100 miles an hour trying to fix whatever went wrong; there's a word for that, it's called panic. If it weren't for the training I had and some of my more experienced colleagues, I imagine it would have been an utter disaster.

I can only imagine that if I have some guns, batons, or any other type of weapon, and am meant to quell a situation, it could get ugly easily.

edit: One more anecdote, my friend is an immigration officer. He had an incident once where he and another officer were interrogating a guy because some papers or something needed clarification. The guy suddenly made a move, they misinterpreted, and it became an all-out brawl. My friend distinctly remembers yelling at his colleague and his colleague yelling back at him, but they could not hear each other. Their minds were in a zone where they could no longer communicate, they were just subconsciously focused on survival. Later, it all turned out to be a mistake, but in the heat of the moment, it was hard to discern that.
A customer service conversation gone wrong
I second that. HelloFax makes what used to be a huge pain really easy. I've tried other options in the past (borrowing someone's fax, other clunky e-fax systems, or a trip to Kinko's) and I'm happy I'll never have to do it again.
I thought of that, too, a few months ago. But several people had beaten me (and you) to it. (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=egsisas&xhr=t...).
KaChing Gets $100M and All Wall Street with a New Name
Findbugs, Hudson and Pizza Driven Development (PDD)
He's helped companies with product placement/customer introductions in the industry, but never to an acquisition. He hasn't suggested a number at this point but would if I wanted him to do so first. Unfortunately I couldn't even estimate a deal size at this point other than some number I pull from the sky and play with in spreadsheets. Thanks for your input.
"Say goodbye to hospitals for rural and poor areas."

That was happening anyway, if it weren't for Medicaid, that is. There was a definite brain drain of doctors (especially specialists) who choose to go to affluent suburbs and urban areas simply because they get more (and better quality, AKA rich) patients. You think if we _further_ privatized the market, those in rural areas would be _better_ served? Isn't that the opposite of what the free market would actually do? In fact, take a look at this study[1] about physicians in rural America. It's eye opening how they advocate federal and state intervention (read Medicaid and Medicare) as one of the solutions (along with opening training up to more potential candidates, which even I as a liberal elitist supports).

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071163/
Hmm. Could you offer a more concrete description of what you're looking for along with time commitments?
Yes - it just occurred to me after I wrote that that my good friends at Wells probably would never have known...

Good stuff. This is a major annoyance for me.
The way I read those statistics makes me think that we have the same GDP as we would have expected to have reached by the beginning of 2009, except with 2 years worth of population increase, productivity gains, and inflation unaccounted for. The Industrial Production Index chart seems to place us somewhere around the year 2000.