skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> AWS is still a US company [...]

That's the very problem (i.e. US legislation), not the physical locations of DCs.
Historically that was how most of the libraries around where I live (London) were created, funded by Carnegie and Passmore Edwards and others.
Then I'm confused. If you need a settop box to get encrypted channels, and the cable companies want to save money by not providing settop boxes, why are they lobbying for permission to encrypt the remaining basic cable channels? There's a leap I'm missing.
It's horrifying that we need a TL;DR for a modest chunk of text - a mere comment.

If our attention spans are that fried, are we any better off than the hypothetical guy trying to fill out a government form?

It's a bit like taking someone's synopsis for what the Bible is about. You can't. You have to read it, experience it and parse it yourself or you can't really know.

Myself, I'm not going to pablum-feed you guys a over-simplified short form version of what I think I just read. Read it for yourself.

No wonder libraries are endangered.
Yes. And as a corollary, taxes.
If you're the author, thank you for helping these people. I hope your work gives you great pride.
Sidebar: Memorization is one, highly over valued, facet of intelligence. I've know several of the 'smartest' kids in my classes to be actually very slow, very un perceptive, very 'dumb' by all standards. Nonetheless they got high honors and accolades because they possessed a remarkable ability to memorize and put in crazy hours. Some of these people put int 20+ hours in to get an A in a lab when I would put in 2-3 hours tops and get an AB.

My point is would you want to work with someone who when faced with the issue of having to write a paper doesn't have the spike of genius to search for "word processor" in google?
I'll be impressed with Pinwheel if it makes money. I'm impressed when any startup has actual revenues (revenues such that a gigantic user base increase is a good thing because you have money to pay for more EC2 instances) and you don't have to be a "celebrity entrepreneur" to make money. Good ideas with great execution with a solid path to revenue make money, and you can be a guy in a coffee shop (or someone spending 2 hours a night after work) to do this. I'd say that your potential customers don't care if you're a celebrity or not if the thing you're building seems valuable to them.
> That article doesn't seem to give much sway to the issue of transaction costs in letting people organise to provide a public good, which is really central to the issue..

There are transaction costs for Government action too. In general they are higher. Government has no special ability to keep transaction costs low.

> Surely as argued above, contagious disease prevention would qualify as a public good

It has excludable ("public") and non-excludable aspects like all goods. It's certainly possible, in theory, to make a profit off it. But today no such thing is organized, meanwhile the Government does have it under control, and the total cost isn't very high relative to the country's wealth. So there's much, much higher priorities to privatize like the postal system or social security.

I think reform needs to go one step at a time. Do I predict that contagious disease control will and should one day be done differently? Yes I guess so, though the far future is quite hazy. Let's not worry too much about that because by the time we get closer to doing something it will be a lot clearer what works or not.

But when you bring up something like education, where we already have many private educational institutions, and public schools are widely regarded as largely failing, no I don't think the Government is good at this and no I don't want to spend billions in taxes on throwing money at stuff with institutional problems other than underfunding (e.g. teacher's unions and the wrong epistemology).

A good transitional proposal is vouchers. In this way the Government can subsidize poor people or any other favored group while not actually running any schools. So if what you want is access to education, paid for by the Government, you can still have that without Government actually running schools. I think that'd be a good step forward.

Transitions are important because if you cut off aid to some group overnight then they are going to get fucked in the meantime before alternatives are created. And transitions are also important in that alternatives are not created before some sort of transitional steps are implemented to allow alternatives a purpose and ability to be useful.
I quit my job and worked only on open source projects for almost two years. This is the article I wrote about my decision at the time:

http://njclarke.com/posts/why-i-quit-my-job-to-work-on-open-...

I never wrote a follow up to it, I guess in part because I'm still not sure exactly what I got out of it. I certainly improved a lot as a programmer - I'd say I worked harder on programming than at any time in my life, and doing almost all of my work in public held me to a higher standard than what I was used to. I spoke at several conferences and managed to get over my fear of public speaking, which was another goal of mine.

Most importantly, I also got to be a lot more present in my 1-year old son's life for that time, which I will never regret.

It did however take a big toll on my family financially, and I can't help coming away with the feeling that there are ways I may have accomplished those same goals without having gone to the extreme of sacrificing almost all income. I'm almost 40 now and given the historic ageism in our profession I worry a little about the kinds of jobs that will remain open to me over the next 20 years.

Anyway I think that if you're at the point in your life where you have enough money to satisfy the kind of lifestyle you want to live, but don't have the responsibility of a spouse and children, then absolutely go for it.
However, there may emerge a development process that obviates some of those breakages.
It's not what you know, but who you know.
Welcome to capitalism.
(Answering myself.)

Not in the same league with Amazon, but still interesting:

http://www.greenqloud.com/

Using 100% renewable energy (not just co2-neutralized), located in Iceland (they have sane IP laws AFAIK), and claiming to be "AWS EC2 and S3 drop-in replacement".
These are all issues of compilation, not reading. Reading Lisp code into cons-pairs, symbols, numbers, etc. is not that hard at all: you can do it in about 100 lines of code. Lisp can be trivially parsed by a recursive-descent parser. "'Recursive-descent'," as the UNIX-HATERS Handbook says, "is computer science jargon for 'simple enough to write on a liter of Coke.'"
My argument is that the fact that any particular stretch of road was built doesn't prove its usefulness or superiority over alternative means of transportation. Though considering much more limited resources and greater personal interest of people in office (and options to enrich themselves), I would guess that Roman bureaucracy couldn't be as wasteful as current first world governments.

Your snide tone is neither necessary nor justified.
You get free dental treatment and glasses if you are a student/unemployed.

NHS dental charges for the employed are as follows: http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/1781.aspx?CategoryID=74&SubC... - each charge covers everything for 2 months subsequently as well.

It is not much really! In 2002, I had to have surgery to have 2 teeth removed which were growing through the roof of my mouth and 4 others removed due to my jaw being too small. It required a general anaesthetic and a day in general surgery at my local hospital, two aftercare visits and one consultant appointment. It only cost me £15 (the lower rate at the time) as it was a referral to a hospital orthadontist. That was it!

You can get GOOD glasses for £30 or WONDERFUL ones for £70 on the high street now in the UK without NHS intervention. You usually get 2 pairs for that. That includes the sight test and consultation. You can also get FREE sight tests and vouchers from your employer.

The UK is wonderful place to live for healthcare!
Ask HN: When do you stop calling it a 'Startup'?
Must read if your own iPhone 4
Show HN - The Confoundry - A community for puzzle lovers.
Can I add to this one little point, which is a counterintuitive thing you can do to help your local library:

Use your local library.

During the year we started Matasano our Chicago team spent about 40%-50% of our time working from the Oak Park Public Library, sometimes in meeting rooms we booked, more often at study desks. It was great. The Internet access wasn't amazing but it was totally functional and we could VPN out through it. The desks and working space were if anything better than what we have now (and we really like our office).

There were times I worried that we were being a burden, but the impression I get is that it's the opposite. What's deadly for a local library is for nobody from the community to be using it, for it to have no stakeholders from the tax base of the community. The library staff was always welcoming to us.

Your hip coffee shop on the other hand hates you with a passion it normally reserves for Scott Stapp solo albums. At the coffee shop, you take up space in a business that's driven by turnover. Someone's going to chime in here with a story about a coffee shop that truly loves the startups that park themselves at their tables and order 3 count them 3 cups of coffee in a day, but I've talked to hipster coffee shop people oh-yes-I-have and at least some of you who truly believe you're doing your coffee shop a favor are being tolerated gracefully, not welcomed, like you would be at your local library.

Libraries have an obvious role to grow into as IT hubs for their communities, now that so much of their knowledge-disseminating role has been subsumed by IT. But another related less obvious role is as a hub for local entrepreneurship; thing thing "hackerspaces" are supposed to do, but are (for so many companies) suboptimal at.
> Learning to live frugally and within your means is also key.

Spot on! That is one of the most important things in my mind. I live very frugally but I live very well!
This is a dupe of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606047
Will Artificial Intelligences Find Humans Enjoyable?
By this argument, it sounds as though you are saying that the rich are inherently better at allocating resources for the public good than anyone else.

This is an appeal to wealth fallacy.

It's quite possible that the wealthy might have interests that diverge significantly from the common good and the overall wealth of society.

Jared Diamond's 'collapse' makes a strong case for this having occurred numerous times in history.
I've read in the newspaper that a number of people are murdered in New York City every year. But just because you read about high profile cases in the news doesn't mean you're likely to be murdered.
People are not "rational economic actors" and do not make all their life choices by "incentives" of this type.

Most people will care a lot more about, for example, how they are perceived in the community. So simply making the payers list public would, in some cases, prevent people from playing chicken.

Many other solutions are possible, depending on context and culture. It's the job of the businessman to use creativity to find a solution, a way to persuade people to voluntarily participate in his project.

What's wrong with Government action?

Two main things:

1) some people will be taxed to pay for the dam who were not playing chicken but genuinely would rather have kept their money and not had the dam than have paid for it. Why? Because their kid urgently needs new shoes or expensive, urgent cancer treatments. Or their roof leaks, or many other reasons. Just because the damn project is profitable for them doesn't mean they don't have more urgent uses of capital at the moment.

2) some proposed projects should not be done. Why? Well maybe people are mistaken about it being a net win. Maybe it has hidden costs which I noticed but other people didn't notice. And I try to tell them but they don't understand my point.

The solution to the "same projects are mistakes" issue is voluntary participation so people use their judgment and win or lose based on their own choices.

Taxing everyone means the dissenters pay for it, and lose out if it fails, even though their judgment was correct.

The Government has no special skill at knowing which dams should be built now, which later (because some other use of capital is more urgent), and which never. Nor at knowing which look highly profitable now but will be rendered obsolete by new technology next year.
I'll add my own ten:

1. Tin Men (1987) - how to sell
2. Boiler Room (2000) - ever worked for a microcap? I have.
3. Suckers (2001) - how sales really happens
4. Something Ventured (2011) - raising capital
5. Achilles and the Tortoise (アキレスと亀 Akiresu to Kame) (2008) - the terrible personal price to pay for following your passion
6. Death of a Salesman (1985) - how following your dream can destroy your family
7. Mean Streets (1973) - investments often go bad
8. Up in the Air (2009) - ever been laid off? ever laid someone off? I've done both and it ain't pretty
9. Office Space (1999) - best movie yet about office life
10. Falling Down (1993) - business change doesn't just transform industries; it also destroys lives
Have you considered working full time while going to an online school? Florida State University has an excellent online computer science program. As long as you keep working, you should have no problem paying for your education even if you lose the scholarships.
I never build one myself, but from my idling in #cyanogenmod-touchpad I think it's around 2, maybe 3 hours.
Good job you lucky guys in the US can sit in the back yard with a 12 gauge!

I wonder how many hours it's going to be before someone shoots one.
Really awesome site. Did you apply to YC?
A social experiment: How much good can the HN community do in 24 hours?
Hey all,

For 46 straight hours this weekend, Penn State students will not sit or sleep to to raise funds and awareness for the fight against pediatric cancer. The event is THON - the world's largest student-run philanthropy and the culmination of a year-long fundraising effort. (Please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQsXojDxVf0 to get a better understanding of what the students are doing.)

Since 1973, the school's students have raised over $78 million and offered consistent emotional support to the children and families fighting this disease. This year, the students will likely add more than $10 million to that impressive total.

As I watch on this weekend with a great amount of admiration and respect, I can't help but want to join in and support the students' effort in every way possible. And I have, but there is only so much one person can do. So for that reason, I'm turning to the HN community with a fun social experiment that will undoubtedly test our strength and commitment to social good and making a positive impact on the world: How much can we help these children in the final 24 hours of this year's fundraising window?

Although I'm not very vocal on HN, I've been a proud member of this community for over a year and in that time I've seen consistent displays of heart and strength from our members. This has given me confidence that, together, we can save a child. The key, of course, is the "together" part.

On behalf of HN, can you donate $5 (or more, if you feel you can afford it) to help in the fight to eradicate pediatric cancer? If we all stand together here, we can help beat this disease. We can give diagnosed children and their families hope and life. We can make a difference in the world.

If you're willing to join me to support the Penn Staters students and the children for whom they're fighting, please take a second and make a quick donation here: http://bit.ly/yRP3lV.

I will track the contributions from the HN community and will write a follow-up post with the results. So that I am able to monitor HN's contributions, please follow these steps:

1) In the "How did you learn about THON?" section (first page), enter "HN" under "Other."
2) In the "Designation Selection" section (first page), select "Organizations."
3) In the "Organizations" section (second page), select "Theta Delta Chi." (Theta Delta Chi is an incredibly committed student organization that has raised over $100,000 for THON this year. The organization is sending me its donor list so that I can tally the contributions from the HN community.)

Thanks to all who took the time to read this and support this cause. If you'd like to help further, please share this post with others on Facebook, Twitter, or through any other means that you feel will be effective.

For the kids,
Max

* DISCLAIMER: I'm a recent Penn State graduate and was heavily involved with THON during my time as a student. Theta Delta Chi is my fraternity and has graciously offered me access to its donor list so that I can conduct this experiment.
Webkit is the HTML rendering engine. The rest of Safari and IE are completely opaque but can still contain bugs.
Growning up I watched as the little libraries around town closed down and the main branch expended. We only went to the main branch when we could get a ride. Recently I read about the ratio of library patrons was proportional to the ability to walk to the library. It would be interesting to know if consolidating libraries was a bigger movement than the towns I happened to live in, but a big change that occurred in the 90's across the country or something.
Usually resolving things like which identifiers refer to which kinds of things is considered part of the parsing step, not compilation; for example, the is-it-a-typedef-or-not resolution problem is frequently cited as the reason C's grammar isn't context-free. And you can't do even that level of parsing---determining which symbols are function calls and which aren't---for Lisp without expanding macros, or special-casing how to descend into known ones.
I have. Online is an interesting option - I was considering taking one or two night classes at UCF for subjects which are cumulative - like calculus.
Some people like putting salt on grapefruit. I'm not saying that it's impossible to like Lisp's syntax, but empirically most people prefer the ALGOL-like syntax, which is why I referred to it in the next sentence as "conventional syntax."

I could attempt to prove to you that "conventional syntax" is inherently superior to Lisp syntax, but that would be a waste of both of our time.
I can't believe this option is enabled by default, native fullscreen mode is by all accounts a bug marketed as a feature in Lion, especially for a video player. It provides zero functionality over "non-native" (??) fullscreen, and actually severely degrades the experience in many situations. Namely, if you have two monitors, native fullscreen is completely broken as it:

1. Forces you to full screen on the main monitor regardless of which monitor the window is currently in. So if you click it on your left hand monitor it jumps to your right hand monitor.

2. Forces you to look at linen (!!!) in the other monitor. It doesn't even do the slightly less broken behavior of giving you black on the other monitor, it literally fills it up with that ridiculous linen repeated pattern so that it can optimally annoy you as you are watching the movie. Not to mention that you should have the option of actually using your other monitor for actual work.

This is why I just can't use iTunes or Quicktime for watching video content anymore. Because someone literally went in and deleted working code. Quicktime used to have nice options for blacking the other screens or not, etc. and they were taken out. Were people demanding this feature in VLC or something?
Lisp is effectively the parse tree in other languages. In the gap between human and machine, Lisp is closer to the machine. Some people like that, but the majority prefer a language that is closer to the human (and perhaps the closer you get to the human the less nice it gets depending on how you define "nice").
I would LOVE to work out of my local library, unfortunately, here in Austin libraries have the policy that meeting rooms etc. are only for non-profit groups that are open to the public. No private meetings, no "open to the public meetings" that are run by for-profit companies. I suppose your garage startup could probably _get away with_ meeting there, but it's a big no-no.
the environments where this is a problem - frequent one-word hosts - are intranets where you want to use the intranet DNS.
Time for 8.8.8.8?
I am a fanatical libertarian and Rand is not a major figure in most modern circles.

Austrian writers are the go to role models for most libertarians, Hayek, Mises, my favorite is Rothbard.
I also highly recommend a couple Michael J Fox movies for this genre. Secret of my Success. And For Love or Money.
The private meeting rooms were nice, but most of the time we just worked from the study desks. Even when we had the private rooms, there was always a feeling of time pressure in them. You might need private space a lot less than you think you do.
I love libraries as much as the next guy. I would love to study at them. But as a student I dont want to study at a place that closes at 5pm on a Saturday. I usually dont want to start studying till 4pm. Compared to my local Starbucks that closes at 11pm.

We have a new library in my city that is beautiful and a massive 77,000 square feet on 4 floors.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/petenator/6866904623/

I love studying at my school campus. Its open 24 hours and relatively quite. If libraries could stay open longer I would frequent them a lot more.
You're in luck. "For $5 you can grab the "big ten" soundtrack and albums from the original bundle". :D
Settlement reached in iPhone 4 antennagate suit
Ironically, the dupe didn't get detected by HN and counted as an upvote because I posted the https URL rather than the http URL.
I also work in the industry and I can confirm all the discussions I've heard on the ClearQAM issue come back to the cost of delivering services and contracts with programmers. Each one of these service calls to install/remove a signal trap that blocks out the frequencies of the programming you are not paying for is expensive. Having huge portions of your available spectrum gated off by signal traps also limits flexibility for future changes.

The issue of encrypting broadcast channels goes back to broadcasters who are demanding a fee to carry their signals. If you have to pay the local ABC affiliate $2 per subscriber to carry the channel they are not very happy to have you turn around and give it away for free without compensating them for every customer who can run a ClearQAM scan. This is an issue as more customers drop all video service in favor of only purchasing Internet service. The same wire that delivers your DOCSIS would have these channels available unencrypted unless a signal trap is installed to block it out.

So effectively the cable industry has always, and always will, be able to block services you don't pay for. The switch to encrypting these channels is just a far more practical way of doing it. Boxee is against this because it's not good for their business model. Cable is for it because it is good for their business model. So let's just be clear this issue is about self-interest either way. Both sides could argue their position is better for consumers for different reasons.

I do think we should have a simple fixed key encryption system so customer's can use their own hardware without the need for set tops or CableCARDs or an IP based system but this is still a ways off. For one thing the entire TV industry would have to adopt this new fixed key encrypted QAM standard which would add some expense to TVs and require customers to buy their own fixed key encryption set tops or buy new TVs that support the new standard. On the IP side new standards would have to be established as well that presently do not exist.
Is there an equivalent for the UK?