skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Virtual schools are multiplying, but some question their educational value
Woah. What? The iOS market is a 2.5 billion per year and growing.

No shit. I'm talking about Objective-C. If more developers could use it and more often, we'd have better libraries, better developers, a better community. Look at the momentum that C++ has despite its flaws.

If you doubt that ObjC developers would be interested in using ObjC but don't because using it on other platforms is too exotic, check this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205372

It is not unusual to only have one type of build system[1] supported per industry

So what? Doing things because it's the usual thing to do is not Apple's way of doing things and it's worked for them. That's also why I'm surprised with this.
It is not about the inability to find a solution, there are hundreds of things that can be done to improve the process ( including major overhauls like the one you suggested) . But the whole topic is such a quagmire that no government want to touch the subject with ten foot pole.
The backlog is there not because the handling is inefficient its due to the country wide quota from the archaic system
clayton christensen advises that the solution to healthcare is personalized medicine, technologies like portable diabetes monitors. Imagine if you needed surgery, a robot comes to your house and performs it, much cheaper than doctors and hospitals. such system are currently being developed with military funding - battlefield telerobotic surgery
Well, he divides the world of photography cleanly into two sorts of people. And given the tone toward my piece, it definitely sounds like I'm in the group that's in the author's good graces.
Another possible way to do this is present the Turker with two vertical pieces already placed together. Ask them a yes/no question: do these two images match?

Iterate intelligently over your favorite sorting algorithm until you've placed all the images!

Note: requires more Turkers but each answer could be worth much less, maybe around $0.01
It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really.

As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit.
It's also my first project using bootstrap.css.

It was a fun thing to hack on.

Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.
This is just brilliantly simple and effective. The fact that you created a fully functional prototype is just gravy.
Here is my trick for taking great photos:

Carry a small camera in your pocket at all times. ALL. TIMES. It has to be one that can turn on and take a photo within two seconds tops. You also have to be able to get it ready to snap the photo while it's still in your pocket, using touch alone. And the shutter has to react instantly when you snap the photo. Unfortunately, most smartphones can't do these things, but a Canon Powershot or similar style of camera can.

Now, whenever you get a sense that something interesting is about to happen or someone is about to do something amusing, put your hand in your pocket and get the camera ready. And when the moment seems right, whip it out and snap the photo right away. Do not let anyone know that you are about to take a photo before you shoot, not even an instant before.

This is the only way to get fly-on-the-wall photos when you are part of the action, which you usually are when you're with friends. Some people might get a bit annoyed at first, but they will forgive you when they see the great photo of them where they look relaxed and natural.

I've captured some strange and magical moments this way. It's a shame that my camera has been displaced by my phone, which can't do it.
"Foreign students have one year after graduation to find an employer, convert to H-1B and then ask the employer to sponsor the green card. Nothing wrong with this."

From personal experience, everything is wrong with this H-1B visa (slavery to employer) and even with proposed Startup/ Entrepreneur Visa which again promotes slavery to "someone."

If US is serious, they should allow 5 year unrestricted visa to all foreign graduates from US universities (no government benefits during this period). With this visa, these graduates can either work for anyone or start business. The exit from this visa to green card should be based on specific number of people employed or revenue earned or income earned.

Keep it simple.
Show HN: Triumvir8 -- Get together, make something
I just finished this website. It's partially inspired by Tinyproj, but with a different angle. It helps people (Programmers, Designers, Visionaries) find each other and form groups, in which they can work on a project together. The focus is not on working FOR others, but working WITH others.

I hope someone finds this useful. Any suggestions or input are greatly appreciated, and will be considered and implemented ASAP.

Here it is: http://triumvir8-vishnu.dotcloud.com/

I don't really have any money to spend on this, thus the domain... If people start using it, I'll get one somehow.
I'd like to know how everyone else came to grips with his arguments against the Zone (flow). I find that state to be an important part of the quality of my life, as well as the only way I can stay employable—without it, I trudge through coding painfully slowly and procrastinate like crazy.
clickable link: http://triumvir8-vishnu.dotcloud.com/
It's hard to take Wilkinson seriously. She contradicts herself within her first two sentences: she says America must welcome innovators, and then says the tired and poor as well. Which is it?

Mexico by far has been the biggest contributor of immigrants to the US in recent decades, yet it doesn't even rank within the top 20 nations with the most immigrant entrepreneurs. Mexicans are responsible for a total of 1% of the these immigrant founded companies in California. They number about 10 million in California, far more than any other immigrant group, yet they hardly rank as a source of entrepreneurs.

If growing the number of entrepreneurs is your only goal, asking the tired and poor to come here is a recipe for failure. Mexicans, despite their origins in poverty, have not achieved much in the way of tech entrepreneurship, relative to Indians, Taiwanese, Chinese, etc. Some countries are better than others in producing entrepreneurs.
Stanford Online Classes. The Great And The Good That Can Be Great
I'm a sucker for these...
Yeah, that's understandable. The gaming world has definitely got a lot more momentum going for it than the music world at the moment (and that's putting it mildly). I guess I just don't see how far into the future you could go with just this particular market segment, even if it does make for easier publicity at first.

Either way, I hope you guys try to score a deal with the Bastion, Machinarium, Shatter, and Nation Red devs, cause those would be pretty cool to see in a bundle.

And if you guys do decide to branch out into other genres, and happen to do a Metal bundle, let me know, cause I'm currently working on a 'Melodic-thrash' Metal album and would love to be a part of it.
I want the Schengen zone to end so I'm not limited by 3 months in all of Europe but instead on a country by country basis.
Jekyll, Github and Emacs: logs of a migration from Wordpress
Do you remember that article from Mark Andreesen that "Software is eating everything"? It's a reality in the West that is often neglected and may lead to major changes in the (industrial-age) model of employment. There are other sectors with similar problems: Green energy, where people assume more jobs will be created although its obvious that it actually requires less human effort.
Sure growth has to slow eventually, but it isn't unrealistic for a successful company to grow 100 percent per year for five years.
Ask HN: Where to go for a work-cation? e.g. wifi and a view
I'm imagining some ultra modern cabin with an awesome view. Somewhere 4+ people can sit down with laptops, turn on some ambient music, and work in a relaxed state of mind.

Wifi optional I suppose, might be better without it. Should be climate controlled. While it would need to be driving distance from SF for us, I'd like to hear about any favorite spots world wide.
"if the EZ fails" - Ok, if it fails...

"there will be a liquidity crisis" - Ok, yes

"IPO runways will have to be extended" - Probably

"all seed to mid-stage startups will go bust over the next 8 months" - Wait, what? How did you arrive at this conclusion? By what do you infer this? Yes, liquidity may get crunched and runways may go long, but you've taken one set of results and taken it way past the likely outcome.

I do understand the thinking that cash may dwindle, but you're assuming far too much here.
The next step: turn it into a game and get it done for free. Even better, put a skinnerian ux around it and charge for the pleasure of solving picture puzzles ;)
Making Money Online 2
Yes, follow up.

People get busy, they forget. Nothing wrong with reminding them.
According to the article, the government didn't subsidize Apple.

Town Manager William “Todd” Herms said Apple’s presence boosts the town’s tax base and helps it lower overall taxes...

Apple benefits from reduced taxes, and the town gets 50% of something rather than 100% of nothing.
This logic has always bothered me, and I know lots of you will disagree, but here it is: Job creation alone is not a noble goal. It should never be used as a reason for making policy changes.

There's an economic fallacy at place here. Jobs, in and of themselves, do not benefit us on the whole. You could give some number of people a "job" to walk around in circles all day long and pay them money for it, but the net effect would be that society sees no benefit from this. Productive jobs, however, are good things. There is a conflict, though: the more productive your job is, the fewer employees are necessary - actually resulting in fewer jobs.

Hopefully you have witnessed this first-hand over the last few decades. Travel agencies have been replaced by Priceline, Expedia, etc. Tax specialists have been replaced by TurboTax, TaxAct, etc. Even simple legal matters can be handled by LegalZoom and the like, reducing the need for lawyers. All manufactured media products (books, news, movies, music, games) are now transferred digitally, which eliminates the need for factory workers to produce physical products. Online banking eliminates the need for bank tellers. Countless other examples.

Essentially, technology kills jobs. We develop software and devices to handle what was traditionally done by people, and sell the services at a much cheaper rate because we don't have to pay for all the overhead that old services once required. This is a good thing, however.

Anyway, I'm all for immigration, and I'm all for tech companies. But the fact is they destroy jobs more than they create them, and are therefore partially responsible for the current unemployment rate. The logic behind this article is all backwards because of this.
"[...]the ones who control real money (doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmas / device makers) are highly suspicious of outsiders."

And each other.
it's beyond the west, china for example has a worse problem, with many 20 million factory jobs being automated out over the past decade
I hate to reinforce stereotypes. But in every Agency I've worked in, most of the IT staff have been under-skilled computer enthusiasts with inflated self worth. This in my opinion is what creates a schism. Many IT staff sell themselves as being much more knowledgeable than they actually are. So when presented with a problem that goes over their head they tend to get defensive and shitty.

I've found the nicer the IT staff, the more knowledgeable they tend to be.

You can test my theory for yourself. If you have a cranky IT staff member, ask him/her to help you with a problem you know they can fix. Note their tone. Then ask them to help you with a problem that goes beyond their skill level. Note their tone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
A little digital compact is not able to shoot at ISO 3200 with low noise, so you'll end up using flash for indoor shooting which ruins the mood. It will not be able to shoot at 5 FPS, which is the only way (in my experience) to consistently get candid shots with magical looks on people's faces instead of closed eyes or momentary grimaces. And it won't be able to shoot with a narrow depth of field, which makes portraits way more beautiful.

If you take a nice DSLR, put it on aperture-priority with the lens all the way open at high ISO, turn the flash off, and shoot at 5 FPS while interesting things are happening to people (preferably from a bit of a distance so things are more candid), you'll get shots that people beg you for copies of. When I do this at weddings, I've have two different couples (friends/family) tell me that they liked my pictures better than the pro who they hired, and I'm not really that talented.
Understanding the Article Title Rules
Man tell me about it.
I'm working on a startup now and I've been rejected a green card. Now I have to go back. Shame really.
I feel like ranting - maybe this will generate a good discussion.

Most of my experiences with IT have been fine. I worked at a Texas state agency once, though, that caused me to dream about throwing IT workers out my office window.

For starters, I was not allowed to use my own equipment. They rattled off some gibberish about security and support even though my mail client supports SMTP and I can read Office files just fine. Also, for an agency focused on security their insistence on using Windows XP was baffling.

Secondly, I was told I could only use a certain browser because of another incoherent argument relying on "security." Interestingly, nothing was done to keep me from putting a pocket version of Firefox on a flash drive and connect to my own secure proxy. This is because the IT guys had no idea such wizardry was even possible.

Thirdly, for some reason print jobs were routed out of the office to a data center in San Angelo and then routed back to the printer down the hall. Printing a single page was non-deterministic and painful, never mind my final reports. This was a result of some state mandate about consolidating IT.

And then there was the time I tried to install Notepad++ to do some minor dev work (they hired a CS undergrad to do financial work so I thought I'd do more than estimate results). 2 weeks later I was approved to use a similar text editor on the grounds that I already have a task bar to manage multiple documents - a tab bar is completely unnecessary and Notepad++ requires further scrutiny. 3 weeks later I had a Perl interpreter.

At my current job they forced me to let them change the root password on my issued machine to something they knew and I didn't. I get why you do this: because you cannot fully trust people and I dealt with sensitive data; fine. Afterward I re-installed my OS and set my root password back. I don't understand why they don't think these things through.
Vitamins Tips - Try The liquid
Personally I believe the problems with healthcare and education are largely the domain of government to fix.

I actually believe in the (now-dead) Republican policy that, in the US at least, education is a state not Federal issue. By making it a Federal issue, we're just creating one giant bureaucracy and we all know how good those are at solving problems.

We should probably have a model like some European countries where the money follows the student and what school a student can go to isn't restricted by some arbitrary boundary on a map.

Likewise the tenure system has to go. What was imagined as a means of allowing academic freedom has become a recipe for entrenched mediocrity and stagnation.

Also, it's a problem that schools are largely funded by property taxes. This alone ensures a better education for the rich. I'm not sure what the alternative is but we need one.

As for healthcare, IMHO we're largely in this position because of the "blank check" model for health insurance and because of pharmaceutical patents.

Each country has different laws about what is patentable and what isn't. In the US, for example, nuclear technology is expressly forbidden from being patented as it is seen as a matter of national security. In India, health care is seen likewise so pharma patents aren't allowed, providing for cheap generic medicine.

I foresee a day when the US will swing in India's direction. Not that I necessarily think this is all good. The fact is, drugs are expensive to develop but it's also true that the pharmaceutical industry spends more on marketing than anything else (basically getting doctors and hospitals to use their drugs).

Also, litigation is a problem for health care. We all pay for outrageous punitive damage awards.

Lastly, it's a problem that insurance in the US is essentially tied to employment and large employers get that substantially cheaper than smaller employers (let alone individuals).

And of course the complexity and administrative overhead are huge problems, which is probably the one area that could be disrupted without government intervention. But it doesn't help that part of the reason things are so complex is essentially to deny coverage.
My New training blog
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Please see the articles that I have and let us know your opinion.
You have to think about more than just the first-order effects. In general, a company will sell more products if they can sell for a lower price.

"Germans worked hard producing goods which they turn around and send to people outside Germany." <-- agreed

"This is a net loss for the Germans." <-- not so simple.

It is a net loss for Germans if you presume that they would sell the same number of goods with a stronger currency. However, that is not how it works. If the currency were stronger, they would actually export less, and as a whole would be worse off.

Let's take Mercedes-Benz cars as an example. Daimler pegs a price in Euros (the home currency) and the US price is driven by the euro price (plus some adjustments, but those are small relative to the product price). If the euro is weakened relative to the dollar, then they can sell cars at a lower price for US consumers. In the US market, then, they would sell even more cars. MB actually cut the price a bit for the E class lineup due to this effect.

As another example, consider China. If China's currency were allowed to appreciate against the dollar, then chinese goods would cost more to the US customers, making US-produced goods more appealing. In the extreme, if the dollar was severely weakened (for example, if the fed printed a ton of money without a similar action by china), then US products would actually be cheaper than the corresponding Chinese products.
Whats stopping someone from making a GMail add-on?
For Europeans the Schengen zone has made travel within the Union far simpler. They should revert this because it ruins your gap year?
It is a common tactic for people invested in a broken status quo to dismiss critics as "not understanding the complexities". Which insurance company or regulator do you work for? I've worked on health care policy professionally, I assure you I understand the issues.

Much of the distortion in the current system come from the fact that employers can deduct health care expenses, which means that you save around 15-30% versus buying healthcare as an individual with aftertax dollars. That single policy is what ties health care to your employers-- in my mind, a kind of serfdom that keeps people tied to jobs simply because of health care insurance.

So getting tax equality by eliminating the deduction, or extending it to individuals, would rock the market. Beyond that, it actually is as simple as allowing interstate competition, which will allow people to escape all of the insane state regulations, and lack of choice, that drive up costs.

And groups can't organize to purchase health care-- I'm talking about a world where my university alumni association or church has a plan, and I could choose that for life, and it has the same tax and regulatory treatment as my employer's health care offering. I want vastly more diverse delivery mechanisms, all competing for my business, and ideally with a long-term relationship that would naturally incentivize preventative care.
Awesome Window Manager is great for dual monitors. Once you master it you can switch focus between them without leaving the keyboard.
I agree, especially about EPIC, but I think some of the integrated providers (like Kaiser) are themselves better at innovation than most of the software/services companies in the space.
This is a very cool way to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk!

I am 99% sure that the image (at least the one that I saw) on the page is of Tokyo's Shibuya station. And the tall white and black building on the right 1/3 of the picture? That's the Cross Tower building, housing Amazon's Tokyo office.

This photo had to have been taken from one of the upper floors of the Cerulean Tower hotel.
There are a lot of countries that lobby for their citizens to enjoy an open border policy where their people can be able to freely come to the US to live, work and own property. Oddly though, these countries do not have open border policies where Americans can come to live, work and own property in their countries.

Let's say you are British. You can move pretty freely throughout much of Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with a minimum of hassle.

If you are American, the situation is very different. There are very few countries you can easily emigrate to. Yet most countries want rights for their people to be able to immigrate to the US.

I would be in favor of a global open border policy. Eliminate passports, visas, and all restrictions on the flow of people. As opposed to now where through WTO style agreements goods travel much more freely than people.

But I don't support one sided policies where people can move easily in one direction but not the other.
Kaiser and Mayo are definitely doing things better than most other providers. Unfortunately the government is encouraging other providers to cargo-cult them by providing ARRA funds for copying some small part of what they do.
seed funding usually provides an 18 month runway before more financing is needed. Mid stage runways are for a 2-5 years. You had a seed/angel funding bubble in 2010, so those companies are likely close to the end of their runways now, so they will need a cash influx. If there is a liquidity crisis, it'll be highly unlikely for them to get funding.

Also, they is still alot of inventory (mid stage web startups) from the 2007 funding bubble to work through.

Mid stage companies, funded in 2007, and had a 2-5 year runway, were waiting on the recent IPOs (Groupon, LinkedIn, Pandora, Zynga, ..) to raise appetite for their stock, but Groupon & LinkedIn, and Pandora IPOs are busts. So the capital markets will likely be closed off to them, and their will have to turn to the secondary markets. But once again, if there is a liquidity crisis, they will not get funding, and they will face a cash squeeze over the next 9-12months, depending on their burn rate.

So you have two web bubbles that will collapse, if the EZ fails. The 2007 funding bubble (digg, etc), and the 2010 angel funding bubble.