skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need help filing US TAX return? This non-profit might be able to help.
I represent a small non-profit company called Free Nepal, Inc. based in New York which is dedicated to human rights, non-violence and education.

One of the things we are trying to do is to make it easier to international students in the United States by helping them with tax and health insurance.We are trying to buy a volume license from Cintax which can either distribute for a small fee or may be provide free to members.

What do you think about this idea? What is a fair price for non-members? Is $25 a good price? And what would be a good price for membership? Is $45 a year a good price?

We are also in contact with BlueCross BlueShield to create a health insurance policy for our members. Would you be interested? How much would you be willing to pay for it? An average American pays about $2100 for health insurance a year. Would you be interested in a plan that cost you $1000-$1500?

A lot of students here on HN seem to be interested in moving abroad (mostly to California), so I thought I'd ask you people about this.

Any comments, suggestions (and criticism) are very appreciated.

Thanks,

Prameya Bhandari
This reminds me of posts I read back in 2002 and in 2005. Which of cource prooved to be wrong.
yup, did not load for 20 minutes just now
What Pac-Man tells us about how we recognize shapes
SearchYC is often really slow, at least for me. The page loading times are on the order of tens of seconds. HN needs its own minimalist search engine designed to search for submissions.
Actually this is an interesting exercise. Maybe one should not share it with the rest of world, but for oneself I can see how it could help.
Undercover for 3 years in a credit card fraud market
Yes, that is mentioned in the site FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

and I think thirty editors is plenty. (I haven't had a problem with many submission titles here.)
The article has a rather narrow perspective on unit testing, given his product is not mission critical. He's basically treating live production as a giant integration test.

Some of my perspectives:

class/function level unit testing is only needed for common library code.

component level unit testing is critical if you want to do any significant refactoring.

non trivial integration tests (especially timing sensitive multithreaded code) can find many subtle bugs that would be too late to find in production.

I've written a few tests (for a database engine) that paid themselves many times over.
Hackers use parking tickets to attack victims with malware
Bill Would Block Banks Taking TARP Money From Hiring H-1Bs
Check out my viral music player widget
Fibers implemented for Ruby 1.8.{6,7}
Remember CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and The Zen of CSS Design book? And Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)? Way cool when cutting edge designers were figuring out what CSS 2.1 is capable of. But such low contrast! And lots of tan. Then the candy-colors-on-white "Web 2.0" look hit... Another year, another DTD.
I wouldn't say that just because someone knows Haskell they are suddenly a good programmer. Some schools use Haskell for their intro programming classes nowadays.
And I got my first job out of college through a friend who had joined the company a year earlier. He knew me, had a decent sense of my ability from our classes together, and gave me a strong recommendation. Every job since has built off that first one, both technically and relationship-ally.

So that's two competing anecdotes. The number of variables here is enormous, but I'll pick out just one: my college network may be unusually meaningful (career-wise) because I'm still living in the same state that I went to school in.
It's a great scalability test then! Memory is cheap, so that should not be a really big issue then, 32G of ram in a server is nothing special these days. Unless of course you're already maxed out, then it is a different issue.

How big is the working set of HN ?
Other things to worry about with tables.

Positioning of tables is sometimes problematic, and I'm not sure how fast a browser can render a 9-cell table as opposed to multiple nested elements, as the browser does something akin to constraint-satisfaction as it lays out the table.
I haven't had any trouble with it.
(Point being, just to clarify, we didn't have the skills, experience, wisdom, etc. to pull it off. And that's okay. You have to start somewhere... we just tried to start in the wrong place.)
Have an idea for an IPhone Game, Looking for other developers
If anyone has some experience in IPhone development and has some spare time, I have an idea for a game that takes advantage of the IPhone's unique user controls and should be fairly simple to build.

I am a developer, but have no experience in the apple world so I am looking to work to with someone on my first app.

For the game I can provide the idea, the art, and programming.

If you are interested, my email address is bradleyt.marsh at gmail.

I will of course provide a much more complete outline of the game to those that are interested.
I think he's talking about the style of the buttons and not their functionality.

(I disagree, I think the buttons are good because they allow both fast keyboard access in addition to mouse friendliness. This behaviour differs from regular buttons and it seems reasonable for them to look different.)
caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been

Why not just keep it all in memory? We talk a lot, but it doesn't seem like the database should be all that large...
I replied that I had misread that. That is a huge amount of money.
I agree "move to" is useful. I'm just surprised, given Gmail Labs, that they made this a default button.

The one 'nice' thing about not having it was that it forced me to create filters to automatically label all my email.

I actually really like the new label functionality. Multi-select and autocomplete textbox is very nice. However the problem I see there is now every action looks the same. Before you had drop downs, and it made it easy to find what you wanted to do. Hence my too many buttons comment.
you know when the Christians bail, they say, "professionally, we are fucking OVER."
"This recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain...But it's just so stupid...I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've finally found something more stupid than Twitter."

I think the only thing worse than sharing mundane details about yourself for the world to see is to be the TIME writer that has sunk so low as to whine about it in a front-page article (yes, it made it to the time.com home page). Really? This counts as journalism these days?
When on the other hand you're user testing every day or multiple times a day, like you might with a web startup, then TDD may only slow you down.

These days I'm at a point where I can usually push 4 or 5 new releases into production every day. It's pretty awesome :-)
The ECU I'm developing now uses a Freescale PPC-5516 running at 66 MHz. That's kind of a mid-range processor for automotive now. I would estimate that it will run ~ 1 million LOC at start of production. C and C++, some small startup code in assembly.
Yep, I was more talking about the style. I do quite like the keyboard functionality, but 99% of Gmail users will never notice/use it sadly.
Entrepreneurship and VC Research in Georgia
Kevin Rose was famous and pitched the site hard. The community started going downhill very early on.
For me the primary use of unit testing is in the prototype stage. I write the tests instead of the application code to make sure everything is sane. I find lots of architectural/assumption problems this way.

After you've got real app code the tests serve more or less as regression tests to make sure I haven't broken anything major deep in the guts of my models and such.

In short, like some of the other comments here: Unit tests aren't for finding bugs, they're for helping you not write the bugs in the first place.
Is this for students only or professionals too? Can you elaborate in detail ? It looks like a nice idea unless somebody pulls your leg. Be careful and good luck with the project.
I think my comment about a divorce in the making in that thread about drizzle the other day wasn't too far from the mark.

When MySQL got acquired by SUN there was a lot of speculation how long the honeymoon would last, it seems that with a fork underway and a founder gone that the honeymoon is definitely over.

Now I'm starting to get really worried because what with mysql being the M in LAMP it probably is just as important to the continued development of the web as any of those 3 other packages (with the 'p' being your scripting language of choice).
Suggestion to yet another meta-thread:

Please use the Feature Request post linked from the front page. Feature requests aren't news and this is getting a bit silly.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Faster Copilot with faster Internet traffic
This just won't always be true. Consider an eleven year old hacker, he/she may be elite for their age level but are unlikely to know anyone on the site.

Same for many of the elite hackers in countries like China and Russia.
That's how most open source development happened for a long time.
I had no idea what your karma was until this comment prompted me to check... kudos. But your point is still true. I usually find myself either loving or hating what you say, and you have been prolific enough that I recognize your username and actively search for your comments on stories just to see what you have to say. As such, I'm more likely to vote on you than someone else that I haven't followed.

To me, karma is purely feedback on whether I said something of value. I could care less about the karma of others, and base my voting on the comment/submission, not who said/submitted it. I didn't realize until now that recognition is also a bias to my voting however. Thanks for being the example that revealed that to me. I'm not sure I'll change my behavior, but it's an amusing observation either way.
A month ago it was a news site. I'd prefer things to go back.

Incidentally, I did submit that as a feature request:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256
Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Windows 7
Economics of Networks (rated in top 4 by The Economist)
what on earth do you need a million lines for ? That's a fair bit of code by any standard, and from where I'm sitting an ECU is a control system with a relatively limited number of input channels controlling an even more limited number of outputs.

Where does all that code go to ?
You can rent a 3bdrm apt for $1500 in JC, easily enough space for a family of 3-4. Utilities, figure $100-200/month. (Savings of $1200 over your numbers). Maybe you want a really big house?

The apartments I'm talking about are close to the path, so forget the car (save $200). Path+subway every single day is $185/month (save $215), for a 23 min commute.

So using your numbers, you are $1000 over break-even. In reality, you are closer to $2500 over break-even. How is this uncomfortable?
Bill Gates TED talk live-blogged by TED fellow
Tipjoy is one of them.
How rude of someone to have _forced_ the author of this article to read Facebook notes that he hates... ...
Wow you nailed the story of my life with your last para.
Natural monopoly
I did add something to the feature request page to this effect:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)
Ask HN:  Is it always this meta?
I'm rather new around here, so I don't know the full history of HN. Are there always so many meta discussions going on? Is this just a phase?
Hit movies come in pairs because the big studios try to leverage each others marketing budgets. You really think that nobody thought of an asteroid movie until Armageddon/Deep Impact?
IIRC MeFi is a one-time fee. I was there before the fee, so I don't know for sure.
Is there some bigbigbig change in 1.56, relative to 1.55, that would justify the wording of the headline here?
Were the instructions "do not use a computer solution" specified ahead of time?

If this was either in the syllabus or otherwise discussed, then it's your bad, and you have to eat it.

Otherwise, it's outrageous that rules are made up on the fly, and you should appeal to the professor.

Appeal to the professor first; don't go over his head.

Your argument should emphasize fairness: rules are being made up on the fly.

Don't print out your homework in a font of your handwriting. You won't fool anyone, and you'll be rightfully nailed for quibbling.
I don't understand your math here.

My point was that they could comfortably go from 2,000/mo in interest down to under 1,600/month in three years. Interest is API / 12 per month so principle gives (1 + API / 1200) ^12 return per year. (1.01)^12 = 12.8% that's after taxes and powerful. They should also be making more money over time even as their debt is less of a problem and you feel good that debt is shrinking fast. Which should help the psychological situation.

Using 12% an extra 1000 down saves them 10$ in next month and every month after that it keeps compounding. At 1000$ per month over interest you pay down 12,700 in principle in one year (assuming you don't reduce your payment as interest drops). In 3 years they are saving 430$ / month, but assume they roll that savings into paying down principle in a ~9 years it's all payed off.

But, they don't need to wait that long, they just need to find the right cushion so they feel comfortable taking on more debt. Pay down 82k (saving 820/month) in 5 years and the world looks like a brighter place, your making more money, and buying a house might be a good idea. Don't want to wait that long, fine share a 1 bedroom, drive a used Honda civic etc and and all that debt just about GONE in 3 years.
So you want to change that title from the original one to one that has editorial bias? Not sure I agree with you.

The solution is flagging stuff like that. It's not really Hacker News to begin with.
Indeed. Unfortunately, though I know about searchyc (because I've been around here forever), it's not very discoverable, so newbies haven't a chance. There is not, as far as I can tell, a single link to it in the HN menus.

Incidentally, Paul was working on search around this time last year. I wonder what happened to that.
2x-3x is negligable when the overall time taken to build a 50x50 table is 30ms. I don't really care if it's 30ms or 60ms. Either is fast enough unless you're doing crazy masses of DOM manipulation.

I wasn't kidding in the least about IE. IE is a small minority on my webapp, thank goodness. If they get a degraded user experience, then that's MS's problem to fix.

"fast, predictable, readable, and one line"
I guess you haven't got into all the issues with innerHTML. Tables, event handlers being borked, etc etc. html entities are ugly and have no place in code IMHO.

I guess some of it also comes down to the fact of mixing languages. I'd much rather write javascript in a single file. Having HTML fragments dotted around the place is, in my view, very very ugly.
Why am I being downmodded for asking someone to clarify his position?
Cussing about the internet: not only for blogs now... Also, I think he failed to see some humorous references in many of those posts.

Oh well, that's how people are I guess.
no, not really. the site gets discussed a lot when changes happen, and changes have just happened.
This is another case of overgeneralizing based on limited experience. Automated unit testing may well be of limited value for building the applications that run a video sharing web site (where failures are no big deal). But now try building a complex library used as a core component of several packaged applications. The library developer doesn't really have a "program" to put through user testing. The only solution to keeping the library stable while refactoring and adding new features is to build a comprehensive suite of unit tests that exercise the library's public API.
Your observation about 6 types of content is fascinating -- it makes so much sense! The medium is the message, right? So content expands to fill the container it is given.
I haven't quite gone the way of mouseless, but I am using vimperator. When using Firefox I was already trying to navigate using vim keybindings, being that I am in my editor for most of the day. Switching to vimperator was pretty natural.
HN is always on about how the community is degrading, though apparently there has been some recent evidence to suggest that it is. That's what all the ballyhoo is about.

There are always lots of articles about "Rate my startup!" and "Ask HN", though. If you meant that you've been noticing a lot of those, then it's not a phase---it's regular.
It's just a phase.

Presumably a combination of a few new features that have just been added and the fact that there have been quite a few new users lately.

There's alwasy a little bit of it, but hopefully most of it will go away in a few days.
Reed's Law : potential value of social networks is 2^N
It's just a phase.

Have you got a demo of the discussion system you mention in your profile? I'd love to see it.
I once had an idea to "hijack" cars/bikes. The criminal would install a lock on the car/bike, along with a note containing instructions on how to pay. Upon payment, they receive the key to the lock (it's theirs to keep, as a bonus) in the mail. Would be easier with a digital where the criminal would just give the victim the combo.

Anyway, my point is there's a lot of ways to scam people.
I took a bit of a more unorthodox approach when I got tagged. I figure it's better to make notes worth reading: http://unalone.tumblr.com/post/75897218/continuing-my-facebo...

Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a "friend" on Facebook might translate to someone you'd barely recognize in real life.

This is a problem inherent with any group. In real life if you paid this much attention to all of 600 people you'd have the exact same problem. It reminds me of the Internet stalker problems that people've started to be warned against. You need to treat the Internet like you would anything else - and offline, you'd never have a party with hundreds of people and pay attention to all of them. If you want Facebook to get better, limit yourself.

If your friends bore you, get better friends. I've only seen a few of these, but the ones I've read were actually really fascinating to read. Writer friends are the best.

When did magazines get this awful? I commented this on the Newsweek article yesterday, too. Weren't these both good magazines two years ago? Why've they turned so pulpy?
Whenever someone comments on the usefulness of unit testing (or in the extreme, testing in general), I point them to Feynman's contribution to the Challenger shuttle report:

Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle
http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

A good summary is at
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/richard-feynman-challen...
All 'Startup Camp Sydney 2' Startups Put Up For Auction
I live on 12k a year in one of the richest counties in the nation. It's easy. You know that stuff you think you want? You don't actually want it, you want the feelings associated with buying and showing things off.
Sit down sometime and take stock of the things you actually use and derive enjoyment from on a daily basis and you'll be sitting there with a very tiny and cheap list.
This is easier now than it used to be. Broadband internet is unlimited entertainment for $20 a month.
Surely numbers are significant here. How many universities teach Haskell, compared to the number who teach Java? Of those that do teach Haskell, how many of them teach it to a level that someone taking that degree would easily be able to extend that knowledge to a level where they could get a job programming Haskell on a day-to-day basis?

It's also a question of perception. The programmers one wouldn't want to hire, according to the metric under discussion, are those who learn a single popular language just to get a job. Is Haskell generally perceived as a language where there are a lot of jobs floating around? If not, then presumably most people learning it will be learning it because they're interested, because they want to improve as programmers, and so on.
Here's the problem. Why do they need a 3500 mortgage? Why should they be entitled to a house that expensive if they took in that kind of law school debt? Let's say you knock off 1500 of that and just pay rent. That's what my wife and I did and she only has about 400 a month in loan payments. We didn't have kids but let's just leave it there and put it in savings or pay off the loans faster. Let's even leave the 2000 in other expenses. That leaves you at 2800 + 2000 + 2000 = 6800. 8100 if you factor in rainy day savings. You should be taking home more than 10k a month at that income range, even in California with its crappy taxes.

It's doable, more than doable. I hate being judgmental or assuming more than I know from their situation but these people just reek of getting overextended and not being able to apply any discipline in their lives.

Then again, they're both law students and didn't read the fine print. Would you really trust a lawyer that did that? I wouldn't.
Agreed. Please make a separate page for the 'Ask HN' posts and keep the main page just for relevant news stories. Right now too many 'Ask HN' posts keep popping up.
No one's saying that (I think). The claim being made is that someone who wants a job programming in Haskell is likely to be someone who's interested in learning new things, not that someone who has learned some Haskell is likely to be a good programmer.

Still, the thing linked is distinctly light on evidence (not a fault -- it's only an email on a Haskell mailing list) and I'm not quite sure what it's doing on the front page of HN; it's not exactly news that people wanting jobs programming in languages that are (1) difficult to learn, (2) interesting and (3) unusual, tend to be people who are interested in learning new stuff and keeping their brains active.
That, I am sorry, is an inefficient filter. I used at one point believe anyone who didn't know C++ wasn't a good programmer until I met a few people who wrote applications in languages like VB and they were as good as C++ developer would have done.

There are other ways to filter out résumés. Within 10 minutes into a phone interview you can eliminate quite a lot of applicants and I for now just stop the interview at that point. Once someone makes it through the phone interview you are pretty much left with a good bunch of résumé to pick from for the next round.
Google’s Answer To The Kindle?
At the risk of sounding stupid, can someone explain to me exactly what "meta" in this context means?
count yourself lucky. attractive women who don't spend their lives acting like 3rd graders just because they can are few and far between.
This is also why people join mensa and similar clubs even though it seems kind of stupid to pay to belong to a "smart club". People need a level of interaction similar to their own. I'm sure most of the people on hacker news are frustrated on a daily basis with the 8th grade reading comprehension level (and the level of mental acuity that implies) of those around them and thus come here for a semblance of intelligent interaction.
I would say that there are many more that don't even offer Haskell at the advanced level, or at best, offer one or two classes in the entire curriculum that use it.
Has every sentence on Time site have a suggested link????
Some arent even related to the article. What annoyance!.
The article??? oh, a rant as this comment. (at least this one is shorter)