skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The times when I have had a high-deductible health insurance I definitely want to know about the prices, but it's hard to get that option, because the doctors assume that you aren't paying for it. Do I really want to pay $100 for an X-ray of my teeth? Not necessarily: last time the dentist said my teeth were great and they are feeling fine to me, so maybe I don't need an X-ray every year, but they don't ask if I want a $100 X-ray, they just tell me to do this and that and then charge $100. I went to one doctor for an eye exam and they charged me $350 because they assumed I had insurance. The same exam at another place cost $50. You could make your same argument about car repair (when you're car isn't working you just want it fixed), but there the standard practice is the give an estimate. In fact, places that do work without asking you and then charge you for it are looked at as shady.

When the patient doesn't personally pay for the service, the cost of the service has every incentive to go up. Is the service better? Generally, yes. Is the "better-ness" necessary? In the case of my teeth, probably not.
Cell Phone Spoofing and the UK Scandal -- What it Means to You
It's probably just space, as volatility isn't a very good excuse. Sure, it's worse with SSDs, but you need to always have backups.
Elected representatives have set terms. We trust them with our vote for a specific period, and they can even make decisions that hurt some of our interests. Has this been taken into consideration? If we can switch votes at will, then it's not much different than crowdvoting. What about abuse of power? Is there a third leg (justice) to punish abusers?
I am under the impression that async UI updating is a rather solved problem. I'd wager Eclipse has even done it since.. probably forever. No, I suspect the real issue is that it doesn't 'renice' it's compilation processes correctly or sufficiently.
From the article:
> You can also drill into each person’s individual ranking to learn their personal opinion.

I hope you can turn that off!
They're different things. Marshmellow isn't about deferring satisfaction, but about using metacognitive skills to reach an outcome you _know_ beforehand is favorable (i.e. two marshmellows instead of one). If you just find a marshmellow on a plate somewhere, by all means, the best strategy is to eat it.
Ask HN: Are you developing a game? Tell me more
Hey HN,

I have always wanted to hear about the trials and tribulations of indie game developers and maybe offer a helping hand in anything possible.

So let's get the ball rolling:

- What is the concept of your game?

- How far are you in development?

- Are you looking for help? Where and how?
Ah, I do use that (rarely). I was looking for something more intelligent that might perhaps help with development, rather than with just typing.
This seems to be a common essay from well-established companies who use PHP and then write "oh gosh we use PHP!"

The key here, as it states, is that they "built their own framework/libraries", which essentially means nothing to indie-devs and other small non-well-established companies who want to build something...

So the trend is simply this:

1) We use PHP because it's what we know, easy to get started with etc.

2) It gets us by while we build our business

3) Profit! Re-factor our codebase, in PHP!

Thus, the blog post should read: "Hey Mailchimp is doing awesomely, so we refactored our PHP codebase with our very own custom framework!"

It's not that PHP is all bad; it just lost the "framework wars" IMO, and I think when companies come out and state things like this, it kinda proves it...
Scientists discover new water waves
An Interview With Telex's J. Alex Halderman on That Co.'s New Proxy method
Two new types of transistor may lead to simpler, more efficient computers
Why don't you just call one repo "Archive" and put all your old stuff in there.
Or echo -en "-n\n".
Your right about the system being designed a certain way and that's how it should work. The problem is that the state has so many more resources, and if you add flat out lying to the mix, the system breaks down. I'm of the opinion that since the state has the burden of proof and virtually unlimited resources that they should also be striving for the truth above all else. When it becomes more about convictions and less about justice, the system will fail to the detriment of all of society.

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever. -John Adams
I wouldn't say that one or the other is more valuable when it comes to blogging. You want to show process, because that shows that you know your shit - but you also want to show end results, because that shows that you ship your shit (which is almost more important).

Having an active, well-written blog shows that you're passionate about whatever you're blogging about (or at least disciplined enough to write about it frequently), and helps you establish a reputation.
Something you might be interested is what happens with our recycling once it hits the curb. I was completely blown away when I heard about this (Toronto specific article, but I imagine you have a similar process south of the border).

http://www.thestar.com/article/584523

I agree though, my common sense tells me that books are probably not a real contributor, but I couldn't say for sure without researching it a bit (I've been surprised before).
Ah, the game of life, where nobody ever ends up alive. What a stupid game to play, yet we all play it betting all our hopes on being the only winner this time. Thank god I got my loaded dice somebody sold me in a dark alley for a kidney. My turn to roll...
"Life lessons" aren't formulas and aren't objective, so they don't need to be reconciled. Knowing when and how to apply them takes maturity and life experience. If that wasn't the case, then anyone could read a list of them and be equally enlightened and successful. A counter-example doesn't invalidate advice, or else there would be no legitimate advice.
If I had to choose I'd probably say C or Python, but language wasn't a very strong influence on my job choice (other than knowing that I wanted to avoid Java). That Fog Creek has done well with Wasabi [1] says to me that language is not the most important thing for most candidates.

[1] http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-origin-of-wasabi/
Inside the data centre that powers Las Vegas' casinos
This should be the Godwin's law terminating condition for language discussion. :)
I suppose it depends what industries (specifically), I did that from retail/advertising design -> web design -> font-end development. Now I can safely do a "fair" amount of server side development as well.
Is Virtualization Worth It?
> Arrays are created with array() as opposed to a more modern [].

What? Why is [] better? Because it saves you typing 5 extra characters?
I don't actually understand why anyone pays for github when it's so trivial to set up a central git repository on a $10/month VPS and you can have unlimited repositories.

Surely developers aren't that desperate for a nice UI for their git repos?! I assume that there are a bunch of web based repo browsing tools you could install for free if you were that hell bent on looking at your code in a web browser
Nine things Successful People Do Differently
> Cheaper is good.

ANT+ stick is $30, about the same as a 'duino. No idea about the price point of the sensor itself, but maybe $15? So you save $20, lose the wireless connection, and gain a painful earlobe. I'm not saying it's a useless concept, but I think it's applicability is very limited indeed.

> Hack-ability is good.

What is more hackable about this versus ANT+?
> When people want to pick nits about this or significant whitespace
> it makes me think that there must very little variance between
> the languages if THIS is the issue that deserves scrutiny.

For the record: this is not the issue that deserves scrutiny. The other issues are more significant.

However this "short array syntax" is representative of PHP's sluggish internal development process. [] is very nearly the de-facto solution for creating arrays, and yet the PHP core devs have, for two years, rejected[1] patches that implement it on ridiculous grounds.

[1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays
Interested in anyone's thoughts on this...
Mailchimp generating strong passwords for users
Oh, a snide question deserves an equally snide answer. =)

Probably better than finding a good dev in other languages for web development considering all the good PHP developers are still using PHP, and all the ones that couldn't cut it went on to learn the next LotM.

Honest answer: The same chance of hitting a good dev regardless of the language.
I'd guess a fair number of people on HN are freelancers. (Myself included).

For the last year or so I've written articles for a Macintosh technical magazine: MacTech (http://www.mactech.com/) on this topic (the Consultant Cowboy series, is what I call it).

I know I need to open it up to a wider audience (read: eBook, or something), but for now it's a semi-monthly column.

(Next article is on consulting with regard to pricing and startups!)
The original gameboy. No backlight. No stereo sound. No colour! No game saves.

(edit: although colour would have been ahead of its time, the other features could easily have been scope-creeped into the final product)
Drupal. Recently rumored to platform 1% of all websites. The codebase is clean (even cleaner in Drupal 7), and naysayers be damned the hook system baked in makes modular coding a breeze. Of course, code quality varies once you start looking at community contributed modules, but that's to be expected.

Downvote? Really? Pfft.
Samuel Holiday - vet, code talker, arson victim
Meanwhile, indie developers are left out in the cold because facebook has banned adsense from apps:

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=32100...
I think I would rather have the RAID so I don't have to take as much time. Setting up the personal info stuff on a machine takes time too.

For Linux / Windows folks, SuperMicro has a nice tower that has 4 hot swap hard drive bays that I really like.
"Bash with Balls" might've been better.
In C it's generally accepted that forward jumps using goto are okay because the version that avoids goto would be complicated and confusing. Often used for error handling and memory management.
Are you a whole team?
http://www.syncany.org/ will kill you all
Not to disregard what you wrote, I just wanted to add that I don't think this post wanted to objectively compare the github and dropbox pricing models.

IMO he just wanted to show how ridiculous (in his opinion) the github model is by applying it to dropbox.
I have nothing but praise for this piece of insanity. I love bash and truly enjoy watch it being taken beyond is intended use cases.
Secret ballots are only useful to prevent coercion. Why else would you want your ballot secret?
Please don't hire based on knowledge of a language or a framework. It's a bad habit, because the best software engineers span languages and frameworks.

I am not a super-dev, but I can write code in an unfamiliar language in a day or two (non-idiomatic, of course). Better people than I can do better, I am sure.

I am sure you will be able to find great engineers if you open up your playing field.
Well the '11 comes with thunderbolt and that Promise RAID sure beats the other external drive options on that box.

// haven't tried putting the VM's on the Promise RAID yet
xp-dev.com $5/month 2GB
Disrupting Taxi Service
>>It's magic box coding

Then I wonder how you feel about eg Ruby On Rails or even jQuery for that matter.

>> It (by Microsoft's admission) hogs bandwidth

It's a design pattern, a design pattern so closely related to classic MVC that I find this criticism strange. I suppose you might be talking about implementing DataBinding by way of DependencyProperties in Silverlight and WPF? You can avoid that if you wish and simply implement INotifyPropertyChanged.
It's hilarious how most PHP programmers think they are exceptional compared to the rest. While most of them rarely code in any other language besides PHP/ActionScript/JavaScript/ASP. And virtually none of them read a serious algorithms book.
Things like Chrome and Dropbox have made this less of a chore.

Speaking only for myself... I have a gold disk plus a little script that syncs scripts and configs to backups. And I use Chrome logged into my Google account.

I do see your point, but a lot of it can be mitigated.
I spend 90% of my day in terminal sessions (python development on remote servers), and while I like Putty, I'm open to anything that can help me develop faster. What features of SecureCRT do you feel would help you the most?
Thanks. I get a lot of crap from people who think I should push back on guests based on their pricing or other decisions. But I prefer to study why people make the decisions they make and how the results turn out.
I would list a few reasons that US health costs are so crazy:

1.) Insurance drives up the cost and hides true costs from consumers.

[...]

The problem with this argument is that all the available evidence says exactly the opposite. Private U.S. health-insurance exposes more of the cost of health care to the patient than any other first-world health system, and yet it's more expensive than any other first-world health system (including America's own socialist insurance scheme, Medicare).

Moreover, the trend over the last 30 years or so in private U.S. health insurance has been to increase the exposure of the patient to costs of care (i.e. we pay much more in deductibles and co-pays than Americans a generation ago did). The result has not been a decrease in health care inflation. Quite the contrary, actually.
The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Successful Color Combinations
Google-Backed Measurement Lab to Distribute Free Routers for Broadband Testing
Two things. First, I think both of your options are horrible, and specifically selected to be offensive. I'm not aware of any aid organization that makes kids do porn instead of be raped. You can keep that link to yourself.

Second, a kid having to work in a factory is way way better than having to be a slave. Keep in mind, these kids would be working back on the farm with their family, but their family can't afford to feed them, so they send them off. Their families are usually lied to about what their kids are going to do. My western sensibilities find this awful.

So i'm a bit curious at this point. It seems you're advocating, since the kids can't have a perfect life, they might as well be raped?
If your backup strategy doesn't account for your main disk failing at any given time you've already lost.
Academic research is one more data point. Sometimes you have faculty and students from multiple institutions. It's not so much the cost that's the problem, rather the paperwork to bill it to various grants over the lifetime of a project. In many ways, it's simpler for one of the leaders to just pay for it personally.

I personally prefer doing public development, but this has been cited by a number of colleagues as a reason not to host at github.
Google v. Belgium "link war" ends after years of conflict
I can't endorse KnockoutJS because I've never used it. However, I'd like to address the two points you made.

> 1. It's magic box coding (as in I put these simple commands in and the environment just handles it for me and I have little idea how)

Is this not abstraction? I'm not familiar with the internals of the Python interpreter, but I'm able to be productive and creative with it.

> 2. It (by Microsoft's admission) hogs bandwidth. In the desktop world that wasn't a problem but in web applications its a big one.

I'm not convinced that this is a problem outside of edge-case scenarios. However, from my understanding, this limitation is overcome in two ways:
1. Large application are broken up into small modules which can be loaded lazily.
2. Time. The average bandwidth of an internet user increases exponentially over time.
Bash's implementation[1] isn't especially fast. It gets its speed by not having to fork, which is expensive on systems with dynamic linking.

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/plain/builtins/ech...
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/plain/support/rech...
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/plain/support/zech...
Summary: Police live tweet search warrant raid for man. Don't find the man, find some empty bags that appear to have weed in them.

Yeah, real score for the police of the world everywhere. Demonstrates just how silly modern police enforcement is.
Sigh. Someone needs to write:

"41 Life Lessons Learned by Marrying, Moving to Suburbia, and Raising a Family".

That's what I did and I'm a happy guy.
"And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ..."

I already had a server setup with redmine and some other internal services that I needed, so the added overhead for backups and so forth was pretty minimal.

I also want to keep control over any privileged client data and not trust them to "the cloud".

For sharing repos I grant people access to the corresponding redmine project (I have a script set up that make accessing things from there trivial, and redmine has support for private projects).

But yes. $50/month is really very cheap and if I didn't have my privacy concerns with github, and the problem of integrating it with my other services, I would probably use that.
This is one thing that really bugs me about the arguments against php. The language has fundamental flaws. Poor oop, no functional programming whatsoever, minimal reflection.

Finding the argument order for a method takes ~3-5 seconds. Its irrelevant. array() vs [] is actually a bigger deal as its indicative of php's verbose syntax. But its not a killer.

People like JS because it got the fundamentals right. The bad parts are just details. PHP is bad because it got the fundamentals wrong. But people still harp on the details.
〉 I have been searching for months for local PHP developers with experience doing TDD or other agile/modern practices and it is extremely difficult. If you are one, please feel free to contact me.

I believe I meet your criteria but can only work remotely. I am currently looking so if remote is an option please let me know and I can send you more details.
Why Brains Get Creeped Out by Androids
Man, I totally would love it if my company would let us use github for our source control. Unfortunately, we are strictly not allowed to store anything outside of the company servers for security reasons and I'm reasonably sure the local github service cost would necessitate making a successful case that we should transition the entire company to it. Which involves not just proving that github is a better source control management suite, but that the git model is superior to the centrally managed, monolithic perforce model we use.
Or we could use the freedom of information, power distribution, disintermediation and distribution efficiency made possible by the internet to obviate the need for centralized government.

I'd vastly prefer that to yet another version of allowing other people to determine my life for me.
How to visit the GooglePlex (Google HQ)
Hi everyone,
I am a newbie of this forum, but I have found a lot of interesting topics that I'll read and comment.
I am writing to ask you if anyone have visited the GooglePlex in Mountain View and can give me an help me to access in it. I've found this previous topic about it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222642) but I haven't friends inside Google. I'll be in San Francisco in August and hope you'll help me to visit it.

Thank you so much.
Quality and Scope are always at odds. Comparing a MUD to an MMORPG you might find programers producing similar amounts of bugs, but individual productivity has clearly increased.
> It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity

Actually, it's quite possible nowadays in many countries, with the introduction of smart ID cards.
Google+ is the social backbone
FTA: We may rationally value additional spending on it if, by doing so, we buy hope, peace of mind, and other comforts that we value more than the dollars they consume.

I would add social stability to this list. Health costs per capita aren't distributed evenly any more than GDP is. While society can tolerate that some get a bigger share of the GDP pie on the plausible rationale that their industriousness contributes to their wealth, it is less tolerant of the idea that the wealthy should live while the poor die. If the new US health care laws do nothing more than create a more equitable distribution of health care then they would be a success.
As a brit who has had a gap year, and worked for it. I don't deny the existence of gap years, or people working on the road, by all means. But taking my past travels, for example, I now realise that I was fortunate to be at a particular point in my life (still living at home) and had parents which were not rich, but well enough off to be a viable backup should a problem arise. I also worked hard for it.

Gap years aside, I'm referring to sustainability when trying to do the work you want to, travelling and living frugally. Perhaps the author of the blog post was waiting tables for 8 years, in which case I apologise. But I'm assuming that, like me, they're a person who might have a bit of savings, and has a skill set in an industry that is location-independent. As such, doing work we are qualified in, on the road, is an option that is available to us. However, I acknowledge that doing so is a luxury. I do not believe I would be able to do so if I was penniless and didn't have a fair amount of work experience.

I didn't mean to be a killjoy. Doing what the author of the blog post did is something that I aspire to do. And as someone working hard towards that goal (work fulfillment + location and financial independence + guaranteed retirement income), I feel that presenting the bigger picture is important.
A few jobs ago, I needed to make some copies, but a five-digit PIN had just been put on the machine. Before going and asking anybody, I tried the building's zip code, which worked.
I'm just supposed to know what the "ACA" is? Why don't people define acronyms anymore?
I'll ruin your perfectly good joke by actually explaining what I meant:

Some patent applications really make sense to me. I read 'em and I say, "Wow, that was pretty clever. I never would have thought of that." Whether or not we should allow patents is a different question, but if we do, I get why the patent is valid.

These, though, I don't get. I know patents claims are a special language, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure a NeXT OS box circa 1991 running common apps covers all this.
Stdio would add unnecessary overhead. And why bother with stdio (or its Plan 9 equivalent) when it's so easy to do the buffering faster yourself?
I think the Hacker News people are probably the target audience for BugMuncher. But in any case, the design is fine. I'm actually impressed it was only $20.
The idea of an ephemeral pathname lookup that takes weeks to stress seemed odd to me. Here's the thread describing the issue, in case anyone else is interested:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103