skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lately it's been bothering me more that we're expected to get our health care plans through our employers. The proportion of Americans who hold traditional full-time, salaried positions at medium-to-large companies is far from 100%. A health care plan is something everyone needs; a job is something much more flexible that we do to earn (notably inconsistent amounts of) money. Moving toward either socialized medicine or the libertarian/free-market model would be better for entrepreneurship -- relying on a paternalistic employer for access to essential services isn't even a local optimum.
Build Honest Materials (Why Silver Painted Plastic Must Die)
I'm not saying they shouldn't be included as I don't have an iPhone, nor do I develop for the iPhone; I've got a CrackBerry and I write for that. The beauty of the CrackBerry is if you want to write an app and distribute it, you can.
I love the format. But would I use the app?

No way.

I want this data on my own website so that an employer can see it in the context of other information I am providing.

If the author had provided a resource I could use to effortlessly put this on my own site, I would have been overjoyed.

Now I have to go to the trouble of figuring out how to implement something similar myself - and customized to my own visual style - something the current site does not allow.
the probability of one cow dying..independent of the next cow dying.

That's a AAA tranche right there ;-)
10 Entrepreneurial Branding Maxims
Each slot machine has its own independent RNG. Even if they shared one, it's still an RNG. Many forms of gambling involve skill. For instance, I can achieve a higher return (though still negative) at a craps table than your average Vegas gambler because I know which bets pay the best odds. That doesn't make them any less gambling.

How much skill vs. chance constitutes gambling varies from state to state. But no state would define a system in which there is no random element as gambling. If the outcome is 100% the result of the actions of the "betters" it's clearly a game of skill. (If it's based on the actions of third party humans and contests, it's usually illegal, such as betting on sports or elections).

Interestingly, in many states instant bingo machines are legal games of skill due to that very reason. They look and feel just like a slot machine, but the payouts are predetermined, just like a box of instant bingo cards, so there's no element of chance, even though the person playing them has no idea what the next payout will be. States have been/are closing that loophole fast.
Remote Control Firefox
Cipressino, il compleanno è stato annunciato « cipressino
Designing the symbol an application will be known by for thousands of users is NOT a walk in the park.

In programming there is an intended result, and for all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter how you get there. It's a 1 or 0 proposition.

Design on the other hand is full of subjective opinions from the client and even the designer that get in the way of defining what the intended result is. Worse, the only way to get close to that definition is to explore lots of different designs.

The process may look something like this:

1. client wants logo, gives the idea of spaceship
2. designer sketches 3 spaceships
3. client says he wanted the shuttle discovery
4. designer sketches up the space shuttle discovery
5. client says he wanted the moon in the background
6. designer adds the moon to the background
7. client signs off on sketch
8. designer renders sketch
9. client says saturn would be much better than the moon
10. designer changes moon to saturn
11. client says he thought space shouldn't be blue-black, it should be black.
12. designer makes space black
13. client says they've rethought the whole concept and need a daisy instead of the space shuttle.

And that would be an easy client. If you start before step one, and the client says "I'll know it when I see it." you can go ahead and double or tripple your workload.
have you looked at getting data from freebase instead of wikipedia?
live demo?
Lois McMaster Bujold: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Me
given the sentence structure, the smiley & the extra email in my mailbox, i think i would have picked up on it.

What I don't get is Ted being pissed. I can't really parse his message, but I just don't read anger.
Yeah, it's been a while since I've boned up on my online gaming/online poker stuff, but I would consider myself an expert on marketplace dynamics and structures (as we invented our own structure for Dawdle.com). This meets all the requirements of an auction site, and by a country mile.
GPL Compliance and Licensing: More background about the Cisco case
That is a good article about a brilliant story that is uncannily resonant today, even more so than a year ago when it was published:

In Sweden he was bailed out at the eleventh hour by a government which realised the economy was at risk from a Kreuger crash.

I'd never heard of Kreuger. I think you should post the article to HN in its own right (perhaps using the subtitle, which gets across the flavor).
Try some American chocolate or bacon - chocolate is bitter without any sugar or milk, and bacon is pretty much the rind that we throw away in the UK.
There are good and bad points everywhere though :)

The UK has excellent:
sweets, ice lollies, bread, bacon, sausages, chips, pies, pasties, chocolate etc

The US has excellent:
shakes, smoothies, cookies, burgers, pizza
Le Web calls to ban Techcrunch from attending the next event
I haven't read the article and am commenting on strictly the title but yes, yes you CAN get different results doing the same thing!
Quibble: Those 2-hour lunches with a beer or a half-bottle of wine aren't a bad thing.

On the occasions when I've been in Europe for business, a relaxing lunch and dinner were what made me perfectly willing to work 10-12-hour days six days a week. In the states, with just a quick sandwich or a burrito for lunch, I'm itching to go home by 5 p.m. to clear my head and get a decent meal. And now that I'm back in school, I find a leisurely break in the middle of the day puts a few more productive hours in me when I get back to the lab.
2000-year-old computer recreated
The accounts managed by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC reported gains of roughly 1% a month like clockwork, with nary a loss, for two decades. Why did that freakishly smooth return not set off alarms among current and prospective investors?

I wonder, is anyone running Benford's Law [1] analysis on whatever meager reported details are available from other firms like Madoff's?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law
I disagree about the time. It looks like the data entry portion of the transaction is already approaching 2 minutes, especially if the person offering the credit card wants a receipt and has to spell out their e-mail address.
Unit of bogosity is the lenat, named after Douglas Lenat. Like the farad it is considered far too large a unit for practical use, so bogosity is usually expressed in microlenats.
Looks like someone is (or should be) taking GitHub up on their offer of a lifetime account:

http://github.com/blog/256-tortoisegit-challenge
Video of Investor Morten Lund at LeWeb. This guys is crazy/awesome.
Agreed -- sometimes the surrounding environment changes.
Updated list of victims:
http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/bernie-madoff-h...
I'm not advocating peace at any cost. I do agree with you that sometimes it's necessary to fight wars, and I would personally take part in it if I thought that it was the right thing to do in a particular situation.

However, you are creating a false dichotomy between committing atrocities and losing the war. You say that historically all wars have come with atrocities and that's true. But there's a difference between observing this fact and claiming that these atrocities were necessary to win the war. The issue I take with your argument is that you make no difference between causality and correlation. And this difference is very important as it determines the extent of atrocities committed as well as the psychological results on both sides.

I do not think that Abu Ghraib was necessary for the US Army to prevail in Iraq. I do not think that Guantanamo was necessary to win the "war against the terror" (which hasn't been won anyway). Both events were extremely damaging to the cause. Guantanamo was much more damaging though, because Abu Ghraib was a violation of the Army's own rules and the people responsible for it have been brought to justice.

Guantanamo, on the other hand, was deemed necessary to win the war and it's one reason why the war has not been won and will possibly never be won, because people all over the world are asking the US, what are you fighting for? Freedom? Rule of law? And then they laugh without waiting for an answer and these are not (just) the evil people.

Things like free speech, democracy, etc, were not achieved by fighting any one war more ruthlessly than the enemy. They were the result of long social struggles, which to a large degree depended on ethical integrity for their success. You cannot create limitless contradictions between what you want to achieve and what you do to achieve it. It hurts your case and it poisons the culture of your own side so much that you're bound to lose the peace even if you win the war.
TED iPhone Application
This is great! A native iPhone application for TED Talks.
It should include sufficient resources to raise children effectively. Underinvestment in poor children, especially at a very young age, is probably the biggest opportunity cost in almost all countries in the world.
The problem with funds is that there is no useful way to analyse them. Past performance bears very little relation to future performance, so picking a fund tends to depend on liking the manager. Very touch to make impartial judgements.
Well, maybe you should read the article first instead of making yourself look stupid.
How Could Wealthy Investors Be So Blind?
I live and work in the Bay Area. Coming from Spain, where I was born and began my career in an US company, I have to say that the situation is very different that what is pictured here (and in the 'Joy of vivre' entry): Spain and other southereuropean or Mediterranean countries have a big combination of emotions and impulses that make them think they are not productive enough. To solve this, they apply a patch consisting or working more hours (in Madrid, people usually work 9-7 the least (and surprisingly at bigger companies such Google and Yahoo! it could be even more)) without understanding that working more is not working better or more productive. Being alienated with this working hors, most Spaniards rely on playing solitaries or youtubing on their terminals until the time to leave the office, feeding the vicious cycle all over again.

The managers in Spain don't trust their employees. Knowing this, employees optimize their time to do the least possible for not being fired.

In my experience, I have a far better life working in San Francisco. I usually go to work at 12-1pm, come back around 6 or seven and hack some hours in the late evening/early morning. I work at least once per day (usually two) and have as many vacations day as I had in Spain (actually some more days) with the possibility of non paid vacations or working from Europe when I visit my family.

I have seen this with many other engineers expatriated from Europe and relocated into the Bay Area. Besides being with like minded individuals, in this city I am relaxed enough and know the company trusts me enough to keep me working way more motivated, at nearly the fullest of my capacity.
A bridge too far, I fear. I've read the complaint and it appears that Cisco/Linksys has been unhelpful & lazy about compliance. But one of FSF's demands is silly and the other is kind of scary and I can understand why Cisco is kicking.

Silly: The demand that Cisco contact all owners of infringing products over the last 5 years is ridiculous. I have one of the WRT45G routers I bought with cash 4 years and 2,000 miles away. If these things were giving people cancer they still couldn't find me.

Scary: “Linksys shall compensate FSF ... for its past distribution of FSF programs in a manner
that did not comply with the applicable free software license.”

What's the going rate for infringement? $150,000 per copy or something?
Yeah, TortoiseGit being hosted in SVN seems ironic. Perhaps they're waiting for it to be stable enough to dogfood before switching to Git?
The TortoiseGit source code is not hosted on Google Code (it's here: http://repo.or.cz/w/TortoiseGit.git).
Holy crap, the top 6 are older than me.
He made quite a lot of money by being an early investor in Skype, the story goes that Zennstrom and Friis were broke and he invested around $100.000 in them before they had a product. This investment put him into the big league.

A few months ago he apparently lost the whole thing in an investment in a Danish newspaper, and is now broke.

I never could figure this guy out - his achievements say he is smart as hell, but his blog (http://lundxy.com/) is full of spelling mistakes and errors, and he is totally inconsistent with no coherent message when he speaks.

One thing is for sure - he is a character...
Startup Madness
I'm not surprised. Microsoft (Bill Gates) didn't see the point of the Internet for a long time.
Universal health care I'm not so sold on, but the possible options aren't just (1) universal health care and (2) the incredibly awful system the U.S. has.

I'm an American living in Switzerland, for example, and here it is simply the law that you must have insurance. And since the government is guaranteeing income for insurance companies there are controls on how much money the insurance companies are allowed to make (from time to time they even have to send checks to their customers because they made to much money!). Since their profits are capped there is no incentive for shady practices like telling every person who claims "no" knowing full well that around 50% wont know enough to push it further as you see done in the US, South Africa, etc.
I love Dropbox and use it every day. But this article says the data is encrypted before being sent to the cloud, and that is not true. Because of that, it's not a good idea to put sensitive stuff on Dropbox, like "accounting" stuff or stock agreements.

For everything else, it is totally amazing.
I Knew Bernie Madoff Was Cheating, That's Why I Invested with Him (http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/145115/I-Knew-B...)
Blu-Ray DRM "Resealed", Disks Again Unrippable until some time next week.

That's more like it.
I don't think the US and Europe can be generalized like this. I've never been to the US, but I can image that startups are a lot different in SV than in other cities.
Same goes for Europe. For example, when talking about the "startup culture and mentality" the author provides only one example: Italy. But cultures are very different across europe, you can't just compare Italy with Spain, Germany and other countries.
Speaking of, I hope Apple has/will have a good way to add and control accessories. The iPhone/iPod touch makes a good interface for almost anything. Anyone know if the API supports this type of thing?
Just enable notifications by email. So an email notification when someone replies to my comment or to a thread.
Previous discussion with predictions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368831
I think it's wrong to think of "Italy" as so homogenous, the North and the South have very different work cultures. In the North, private enterprise and entrepreneurship are prized, in the South people just want a 9-5 job working for the government. This pattern is repeated across Europe, in Belgium for example the Dutch-speakers in the North are very much more economically active than the French-speakers in the South. In the UK the pattern is reversed North vs South but it is still very evident.
Yes, but if you try to buy several products in this way you're not always winning, so the average price each individual pays per successfully purchased product will be awful, or the business model wouldn't work.
it's not in the cloud, it's in your drive or drives and in the cloud... have you ever used it?
Right. Which is fine because that's the entertainment aspect of it. You're playing a game where the goal is to get a product for the best price, and you know it. And if you don't succeed, you lose some money, and you know that too.

Seems like a fun game to me, I'm already thinking about how I might be able to take advantage of it.
On a related note, I've been interviewed a number of times about poker and am always asked whether it's a game of chance or skill. I always tell them both, which people just don't want to accept as an answer. I don't know why people think all games are one or the other.

Sure, some games you can be +EV, some you can't without cheating, but that doesn't mean it's binary.
Eventual consistency is easier to implement but a pain in the butt to use. I shy away from SimpleDB for that reason alone - it's too hard to wrap my head around it.
If you do the maths using the UK government's own figures, it's actually cheaper to scrap the entire welfare system and just give every man, woman and child in the UK #3000/year, no questions asked, no strings attached. A family of 4, outside London, could live reasonably on 12k (untaxed, remember) a year, and anything you earned above that would be counted as regular income and taxed accordingly.
Threads Basics
He may be an engaging public figure but, I fear doing business with him would be a complete nightmare.
Mathematica 7 Can Retrieve WeatherData from 17,168 stations
Internet usage in France was incredibly low until a couple of years ago

To be fair, the French were doing with Minitel what most people use the Internet for decades earlier.
Rising productivity of Chinese workers will raise their wages.
It was made by an American, so what is the insight it gave you? That maybe America doesn't have a good work/life balance and it's starting to bubble up?
Toshiba will ship flagship laptops with OpenSolaris
Or you can charge 100k for a logo with no options for the client:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak#t=3m10s
http://developer.apple.com/ipod/accessories.html

In short, no, there is not a quick and official "good way" to add accessories to the dock interface.

If you email them, you get back a response starting wtih:
"Any accessory that utilizes Apple IP is required to be licensed through the Made for iPod program." Attached to the email is a zip file containing a read-only word document.

The word document tells you to enter contacts for legal, marketing, and engineering. You must have at least two different people as contacts.

You can probably jailbreak your phone to access custom made accessories:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
(IANAL) FSF has to make those silly/scary claims in their suit because lawsuits much like negotiations will end up starting at extremes of price and will work their way to a generally 'reasonable' middle ground. Which may be something more like a bunch of money to FSF from Cisco.

Also, we might get some good case law if this actually goes to trial.
To clarify people that where taking the high risk stuff got hit early when the economy was doing "well" but for the most part the "AAA" stuff could withstand a fair amount of foreclosures with little impact. The crap nobody wanted was really high risk so banks kept it which is one of the reasons why Lemon Brothers failed. Granted there was also a fair amount of crap rated like gold, but late 2007 to now we have been in a recession which kept feeding off of more and more people getting bitten as an ever increasing number of mortgages failed while nobody wanted to buy the property's.

Let's say a bank loans 300k on a house that was worth 200k but got inflated to 300k in a bubble fine somebody takes a 100k hit when it fails but they are only down 33%. However, if nobody is going to buy it for six months and by then it's only worth 150k and the spiral continues.

I also think the economy was fubar as early as 2005 with the fed using low interest rates to make everyone pretend that the economy was fine this was really helped by CDO's and people taking out risky mortgages. Then there was a little bump in interest rates which finally set this ball rolling but it was obviously going to happen at some point. Basically, when any little thing is going to upset the house of cards there is already a problem even if it looks ok.

PS: When the economy tanks it's a lot harder to prop up stupid companies so we are seeing a lot of things that where on their death beds for a while all fail but in the long term this is a good thing.
but his blog (http://lundxy.com/) is full of spelling mistakes and errors

maybe english is not his first language?
If I understand it correctly the Dropbox is an application-level file-monitoring thingy. It is not a filesystem-level real-time backup software, which is something that is substantially more complex to implement.
It isn't - but considering that he is from a country where everybody speaks english, and that he is an international businessman I think you can expect a certain standard.
IGuy iPod Nano 1G Skin Case
Speck Products iGuy iPod Nano Case & Toy - The iGuy might just be the most unique iPod case so far. It's a cool toy and protective case in one, featuring little rubberized feet, and bendable, posable arms! He's fully functional, giving you full access to controls, headphone plug, & hold switch.
> I'm not sure if I'm being a douche by saying this

Geez, really? You're not sure?
Unlocking iPhone 3Gs – the Vietnamese way
Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little about mercurial
Is git fundamentally/technically better than mercurial or is it better marketing? Has mercurial failed?
I admit to being a bit suspicious of something that needs to preface itself as "legal".
Whoa. I meant designer up there not "deutber" (silly iPhone), kinda ironic given I was talking about retarded comments...

And you're right about engagement, for something as mass market as a search engine, maybe techcrunch is the right place to get attention just not advice. :)
(disclaimer: I've only used a cellphone and never made one.)

I think the problem is much deeper than you'd think. Its very difficult to know the battery cost of an action (some CPU ops take less power iirc), and also I'd imagine that certain execution patterns would be more efficient than others. For example, GPS fixes have some caching involved, so two applications with very similar GPS access patterns could possibly halve their power consumption by simply being scheduled back to back.

Further, I'm not sure whether CPU is really the killer. CPU drain affects latency, which is bad, but for example keeping the radio running (data access), or keeping say accelerometer sensors on (perhaps the generate constant interrupts that interfere with the system's low power state.)

I have an Android phone, and there is some screen that displays uptime statistics and also "time awake" which I think is an indicator for the proportion of the time the CPU is maxed, and even when I run top on my phone I have NO idea what it means or whats at fault. This is partly a tools problem and also partly a problem of some things being products of some particular interleaving.

Another thought is that you have to be very careful about what you measure. Even in the desktop, lots of IO will probably show up as IO waits in your process, so latency is suffering even though the process itself is unrunnable (and worse, the blame would fall on the kernel's IO scheduler probably, thus hiding the blame further. And what if you want to write something but your system is already busy? Who's at fault, the other guys in the IO queue? What if all the apps in the queue are being nice and its just say a DB engine with raw disk access? Complicated complicated stuff.)
You seem to have very absolutist views about Islam.