skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've spent some time thinking about different startup ideas / permutations to address exactly this solution. In my research, I've found attempts at both methods you describe above, in various forms and various states, with widely varying degrees of success, but most have ended in failure. The "successes" tend to offer some limited choice in plans, but the rates certainly aren't great and the deductibles are still pretty high -- mostly it's a fallback safety net for serious emergencies.

I think a startup that can help tackle this issue would create tremendous value in the payor / consumer market, but the field is extraordinarly complicated and requires a very rare multi-disciplinary background in individual state law (CA's system alone is very different from, say, MA's bc CA is HMO-based and MA has a public option), behavioral economics, gov't regulation, insurance underwriting methods, insurance administrative practices. Oh, and if it's a tech startup, the team would obviously need web dev / product skills as well.

The problem is, developing a basic mastery of all these subjects takes a lot of time -- reading, thinking, and experiencing to understand the pain points deeply. That tends to cut against the stereotypical startup team of two young twenty-somethings hacking away and living on ramen, who have never studied the insurance industry or directly experienced the pain of searching for or relying heavily on health insurance (bc young 20 somethings tend not to have major health problems). I think that's a key reason why startups haven't done much innovation in the insurance payer market.

My latest line of thinking is about whether there are hacks around the problem that can incrementally chip away at and disintermediate insurance payers as the sole gateway to affordable healthcare.
Or, perhaps people developing in these languages are in a more zen like state? :)
I'm completely stunned that PHP is on the bottom here.
But he said he sampled equal number of commit messages from each language.
I know the conventional wisdom here would be to release early. But beware the distraction that can be -- you suddenly need to find some extra time to worry about keeping the server up, responding to feedback, etc.

If you really feel there is a killer feature that sets this apart from a 'me too' site, then I would push to implement a minimal version of that and release with it in place.

Of course if you have not validated the killer feature in any way then maybe it is worth the time to mock it up and try and get feedback. Perhaps a simple landing page without any site around it would serve that purpose and not distract people with the basic features.
I wouldn't call it to 'tweak' the data collection. He is simply normalizing the results to ignore the differences in language distribution.

This is normal and has nothing to do with how you choose to represent it.

It would have been meaningless to show any graph or table saying 'Python has the most messages with profanity" if the amount of Python projects is 80% of all the projects out there.
Hung Out to Dry: A Taxonomy of City Blocks
It would be great if you required companies to post pay ranges. Some jobs that I may not find interesting might become interesting if the pay is right. Without pay, it's very hard to determine which are worth pursuing.
It'd be interesting to see the original dataset. At the risk of stereotyping, what's the chances php programmers simply don't leave useful commits? (and perl programmers don't leave anything parsable ..)
Ahem, "Note that I ripped an equal amount of commit messages per language". I do think this is a bad place for a pie graph, but your specific criticism here is misplaced.
It never ceases to amaze me the contortions that people will go through in their pursuit of bashing Apple.
GCD is an abstraction that uses queues to communicate work items between pools of worker threads. It has much in common with the actor model in this regard. It doesn't immunize the programmer against race conditions, but it certainly does make them easier to avoid than using pthreads directly.
I find most movies to be predictable. "Hero's Journey" and all that. But I assume you mean less structural, and more like knowing exactly what they are going to say (or what jokes they'll use for a situation). I hate that.

But still, movies are (generally) business first, and art second. They don't even want to be "new"... just "fresh".
I want to know the proximity of the curse to 'IE' in the Javascript commits
Portable Cloud Computing
Go Ruby go!! ;D
Is it blasphemy to want Go to have a horse in this race?

An equivalence beyond eval anyway...
http://golang.org/pkg/exp/eval/
awesome app!

one suggestion, why not use instapaper's oauth rather than taking user's credentials?
Finally, I hate the stigma people have with remote workers. I have made 90% of my income over the past 10 years this way, but it is tough to find people willing to work like this.
It's definitely a worthwhile upgrade for those of us running it in production in demanding environments. Many of the memory optimizations alone will make upgrading worth it.
Dynamic Fundraising Pricing
Shared interest != living compatibility.
Two spaces is sufficient.
if you file the right paperwork, the FCC will keep things embargoed.
In a production environment, at scale, this is a relatively uncomplex example, I think. At any rate I've seen significantly more complicated multi-service architectures for what would also have been called a "front-end" business.
It's hardly a mortgage either way.
While I agree that this item is of interest in general, can you elaborate why you think it's of particular interest to Hacker News? I can see nothing that makes this specific to hackers.

But you've been here on HN a long time and have accumulated huge karma, so obviously you know better than I. I read the guidelines and see:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,
unless they're evidence of some interesting new
phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news,
it's probably off-topic.

This seems like something that would get covered on TV news.
Nat & Simon, if this is the sort of site that you're putting together for free for SXSW, I'd love to see what you'd put together for another big conference that paid you guys ;-D

Should be even more awesome-er when you've got the location details hooked into the sessions - at the moment it's still a bit crazy ("Oh, I want to go see this and this, they are 10mins apart... but are they on opposite sides of the city?!").

Plus I'm waiting to see what the SocialTies app looks like when that launches... another Brighton tech couple... awesomeness!
That's not the case, that's just his personal choice. He could just as well have gone with %age of swear words per commit which would have made the number of commits per language irrelevant (as long as that number was kept above statistical nonsense) and would have yield the same result.
People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones.

IMO this is a weak argument - you could say the same thing about startups. When it comes to creative work, it's all about the execution.

Just because a story is being retold doesn't automatically make it bad. Similarly, just because a story has been told before doesn't mean you can't tell it again.
somebody hide this from deepak chopra before he claims it as validation to one of his open ended theories!
My interpretation is that anyone still working in PHP is long resigned to its frustrations.
That is not the case. He wanted to compare curse words across languages independent of language popularity. If he did not collect the same amount of data per language, then he would have two variables: number of curse words and number of commits. Then there would be the danger that a more popular language would have far more curse words simply because it has far more commits.
To be honest, that's better than most "technical solutions" governments manage to come up with. Better than trying to route everything through a giant firewall or messing with DNS tables.
"it's a disgrace that we give Google transit data but locals can't compete"

my city and transit system offers that info to locals if they want to compete.
A small child doesn't think a crayon is badly designed until he has used a pencil or a pen. Without a frame of reference, a PHP developer has little reason to swear at the code.
No idea about millions, but I remember Simon saying something like it running happily at (IIRC) 60second intervals. Hopefully he'll elaborate.
Actually, Gorbachev had given a speech at the previous Warsaw Pact convention where he explicitly said that the USSR would no longer give military support to other Pact countries facing uprisings. After that, it was just a matter of time till the Iron Curtain fell (or Gorbachev was deposed).
It's been my theory that now we have movies that are more inspired by computer games and other movies than real life. This is subtly manifesting itself in a bizarre circular feedback loop.
How does Disqus make money? Has IntenseDebate made money since being acquired? Does revealing this information make Disqus a more likely acquisition?
Ok so I'm being a negative ninny and pedant but California has numerous fair-housing laws that they are bumping up against here.

For example, it is illegal to discriminate a tenant based on "source of income" - so if one potential tenant works for a startup and the other works for an investment bank, you can't choose the tenant who works for a startup over the other simply because of where they work. Nor can you legally advertise as such.

(http://www.aroundthecapitol.com/code/getcode.html?file=./gov...)

I totally get the desire to have an all-startup household, but I'm also raising this because I think we would be outraged if other fair-housing laws were being flouted, like discrimination based on ethnicitity or sexual orientation, and so I'm minded that it is important to respect the CA fair housing laws in their totality.
Perhaps they don't write meaningful commit messages?
Thanks for the tips, makes sense!
Among the most interesting changes are the new expiry semantics (you can now reasonably expire compound values like lists and sets; previously if you appended to a list with an expiry set, it would first clear the list), and the WATCH command [1] which lets you construct atomic operations out of sequences of commands.

[1] http://redis.io/commands/watch
Where are you located (geographically)?

We have a couple developers more or less dedicated to performance at this point, and we're moderately satisfied with server response time for most areas of the site (the issue tracker is a notable exception -- we're working on that).

I ask about your location because we also have some latency issues as you move further away from the US east coast (Wash. DC) datacenter. We're working on that also.

Would you mind maybe submitting the output of `ping github.com' and any other pages you find intolerably slow at http://support.github.com/ ? If that's too slow just dump stuff here I guess.
Yes, and? The amount of messages is equal, the amount of profanity per a set of commit messages (which is what is measured here) is not.
Considering that there were an equal number of commit messages for each language, this is a perfectly adequate representation. In this case, the pie chart's total is the number of swears, with each slice representing a language's share of that.
For a HTPC, you have to do a one-time organize to get your files in order. For movies, it's helpful to add the year to the title. For TV, it's helpful to organize so that the season/ep is in a standard format like S0XEXX. Once you do that it's pretty flawless. If you run SickBeard + a bittorrent client, you can pretty much automate things 100%. It's a very smooth setup once you get through the initial hurdles of organizing your downloads.
For the record, the Lisp dialect that is mentioned in the comments is http://lush.sourceforge.net/
with respect to the discussion, it is on the R/Python side, ie. powerful general-puspose (Lisp) language, with builtin Statistics facilities.
Oh, good point. BTW, I am not arguing that "older" entrepreneurs can't start huge wins, but rather, the very very big wins are anecdotally started by younger people (for SW, and in particular internet cos).

Another analysis I would love to see (if I have time will do it myself) - take the 20 largest SW or Internet companies started in the last 20 years. Graph age of founders vs. company outcome.
I find it a bit easier.

Very simple and easy to use interface. Very visual on comparing timelines of flights. I'm also fond of the no nonsense prices, no added fees.

What is lacking for me are "fuzzy dates," when I travel I don't mind looking +/- a day or so to get a cheaper flight.
The full Instapaper API only works for users who are already paying a monthly subscription to Instapaper, which we thought was a small percentage...
Home - Windows Live
This is absolutely huge. Having gone through the suffering of getting a merchant account recently, the amount of subterfuge, hidden fees, etc in the industry is staggering.

If Square acts as a gateway and merchant account with a flat, easy fee at pricing comparable to PayPal, they could make a big impact in the industry.
Asked them about this recently and the answer was that the io wasn't a problem. Better bang for their buck elsewhere.
One explanation behind increasing polarization could be the internet.

I would assume that there are more movie critics now, or at least critics are more visible. Thanks to sites like Rotten Tomatoes, even a local newspaper critic can have global reach.

Due to this visibility, it's harder for critics to stand out. The easiest way to stand out is to be extreme or contrarian which would lead to more polarization.
"Bare metal" as in "not-a-VM", yeah.
Thanks! Geolocation is a good idea to remove an unnecessary step.
Contribute the max that work will match, and put it in the safest vehicle that you are given an option to invest in, preferable T-Bills.

The money will add up over time, and it is like getting a 6% raise!
“The Market has to be huge because everyone makes mistakes. You never quite get it right the first time. I believe that the Internet is very efficiently arbitraged. Anything you can think of has been thought of and tried. The only way you’re going to find something is if you stick to it, at an irrational level and try a whole bunch of things. Companies that don’t do giant pivots are always doing micro pivots. “You need a large enough market that you can pivot in and you still have a customer base. Another related point to that is – it’s just as hard to build a large company as it is a small company, so you might as well build a big company. It’s roughly the same effort.”
In terms of absolute dollars I agree. As a consumer though, I'm going to be looking very hard at what I am getting for an extra 20% cost over the iPad. Many consumers are still going to consider the iPad a much better value.
How HackerNews ruined my morning
My guess is that this applies to property owners/landlords looking for tenants. The article talks about finding roommates, which I'm pretty sure is ok to pick and choose...
roomate != tenant.

edit: looks like fido and I hit the 'submit' button at the same time, heh :D
Great idea! Whenever I include the "Who is Hiring" posts in my Hacker Newsletter it always has a high click rate. Another great resource to send people to now if you can keep it going.
You'll have to forgive slightly imprecise language. This post was in response to the noise around the blogosphere that Hollywood has become too conservative, and is targeting reliable niches (as you point out).

We think one interesting way to observe the above is via polarization.
Yahoo Japan, Ooyala in video partnership
DriveSmart Android App Plays On Parental Fears Of Teens Texting While Driving
The fact that people think something as important as the nation's health care is politics may be a problem in its self.
Most swear words are international.

Especially the F bomb.
Harmony: sketching and drawing online
Out of curiosity, what were the two movies?
> The key, we think, is to look for movies that some love and some hate, which is the likely profile of a bad movie that's "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase.

But according to the graph, Toy Story 3 was the least polarizing movie of 2010 and that seems like a prime example of a movie "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase.
Exactly. The "if you have nothing to hide" canard glosses over the significant fact that we all have something to hide, at least from the truly malicious.

This isn't new. Just consider the infamous remark by the notorious Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), as quoted by that other monster of the State, Henry Kissinger; "Give me six lines written by an honest man, and I will find something in it with which to hang him".

The nasty thing about truly nasty people is that literally anything you say can (and will) be used against you - provided they retain room enough to maneuver. Sensitive information is simply that which has the greatest propensity for abuse in the hands of the abusive. People like this tend to dislike strong and open courts, where they're sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth under penalty of perjury.

Needless to say, Cardinal Richelieu was careful to avoid accountability of that kind. Kissinger too.
nat-a-VM. As far as I know, GitHub was hosted on EngineYard VMs before they moved to rackspace.
> I don't know what to think of Singleton being a trendy idea.

I suppose, like Agile processes and OO, Design Patterns introduced some ideas with real merit, but some people got way too hung up on the less meritorious ideas that came along for the ride.
Intel Leads $12 Million Round In Game Developer Digital Chocolate
PHP is very international - I wonder if it would rank higher if, say, German swearing was counted?
To be fair, writers have been doing this for a long time...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_style#Similarit...

Did you watch The Social Network? Did you like it? I think we all knew how it ended, it was the writing, cinematography, etc. that account for its popularity. And the fact that the writers stretched the truth so the story would be somewhat fresh :)
Doom now playable on a TI-Nspire calculator
You can just use HN with my little Ycomments hack:

http://will.m.aier.us/ycomments
So my taxes count, but acabal's don't?
I didn't fully understand that explanation, but I'm trying to see how a potential client can contact me using the system you suggest.

And if a potential client can, why can a spammer not?
"That the niche being served is largely adolescents is unfortunate"

Ever seen the Poochie episode of The Simpsons? The producers try to boost the ratings of Itchy and Scratchy by adding a ridiculous character designed to appeal to everyone. Near the start of the episode they hold a focus group (text from snpp.com):

Man: How many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day?

Kids: [clamoring] Oh, yeah! I would! Great idea! Yeah, that's it!

Man: And who would like to see them do just the opposite -- getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?

Kids: [clamoring] Me! Yeah! Oh, cool! Yeah, that's what I want!

Man: So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?

Kids: [all agreeing, quieter this time] That's right. Oh yeah, good.
"We don't have Emirates at the moment" ...?

I see Emirates all the time when I search for SFO-BOM
You are betting that you will have large bills. Your insurance company is betting that you won't.
I held out and I'm hoping to catch a cheap first-gen after the second comes out.
Yeah cos embargoes and NDAs keep everything secret, particularly when applied to external parties and government agencies.
Awesome app, just wondering- is there going to be some way to figure out which of your twitter followers are using it already? Or a list of 'recommended reads' or people to follow? Will it ever aggregate shared or "liked" items on Facebook?
Now, that scrambled my brains. Uncomplex? I thought this was pretty complicated and that mojombo was a scalability God (and he may be).

Could you point me to more complex examples?
yes that would be interesting. thanks for article.
Hah, maybe I should add that to http://langpop.com - are you interested, Andrew?
Startup Builds Census Map Block by Block
Stereotyping the indian workers (from India. not the ones from overseas who have very different attitudes):

Love what you do. Enough that you have a portfolio of cool OSS shit I can check out. Enough that you read HN or your favorite Node/Django/Rails sites in your spare time.
Do you really think that "it doesn't really matter" how you make decisions concerning things like which direction to take the company, whether to hire a potential employee or not, or whether or not you should accept funding from a particular source? Are those really the sorts of things best left to RPS? It seems like you might want to have a bit more intentionality behind such processes that could seriously impact the success of the venture
Hi, I made Twitterfall :)

I keep an eye on it and add features now and then, but I admit I don't make massive changes or add huge new features. I'd love to migrate to Site Streams one day at least.

If anyone has some useful feedback about Twitterfall though, I'm always interested.
Roku if all you want to watch is netflix and some other streaming services (which I can't enumerate right now). Boxee if you'd like to watch a lot of local content as well streamed over your network. I ended up choosing Boxee the day after they announced Netflix support had been implemented.
I'd argue that looking at polarization is a good way to detect such movies, but that not all such movies are polarizing.
Presumably there are at least a few people who don't buy the absolute cheapest iPad out there, right? My understanding is that there are a few different iPads with different amounts of storage and whatnot, with prices that vary by a few hundred dollars. (Correct me if I'm totally off-base here.)

Someone looking to buy a $500 iPad might well be put off by a $600 price tag on another tablet. On the other hand, someone looking to buy a $700 iPad (or even a $500 iPad plus a $30 case for it) probably won't be, I wouldn't think.
I've created successful products (pretty close to commodity products, in fact) before where I tried to evaluate direct competitors, and found over 50 of them before stopping counting.

Here's what emboldens me when learning about competitors: When you initially had this idea, you weren't aware that all of these competitors existed. Which means that some segment of the market, including potential customers who are * similar to you* also don't know about all of the competitors. To them, the other people with the same idea might as well not exist.
There is still a 15 cent fee if the card number is entered manually...
Either way, I find much of the best information on some narrow topics are on sites that could be described as "blogs".
Its a really interesting article, but their methodology doesn't support their conclusion. I'm willing to accept critical rankings as a measure of quality, since I can't think of a better way of mapping the subjective notion of quality to a quantitative measure. There are still some dodgey things being done here though:

1. Polarization as a measure of quality
2. Choice of the top 20 movies as a selection measure.

The article should really be title: "Popular movies are becoming more polarizing". Though I concede that blogs like this are written to attract hits and "Movies are getting worse" is probably more likely to achieve that.
My understanding is that in San Francisco, especially, the laws are very broad and occur at all levels - which from the perspective of 'fair housing' makes sense.

I will try to find the article I read on this recently.

UPDATE: roommates can choose based on gender only where there is a shared bathroom, kitchen or common area. That is all.
Is Node.Js Becoming A Part Of The Stack? SimpleGeo Says Yes.