skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots"
-Billy Connolly
> The parts of medicine that tend to get ever more expensive are the parts that involve third-party payment.

Medicine has a problem with third party payments that are invisible to consumers, coupled with insurance premiums invisibly negotiated by employers, coupled with ridiculous regulations that have created an enormous amount of dislocation of the economic incentives that would tend to drive prices down. In short, government got involved. What's our national solution? More government involvement.

See any similarities between health insurance, retirement planning (Social Security), "free" healthcare (Medicare & Medicaid), student loan programs and the cost of college education, or maybe in the home loans that caused the housing disaster?

Disaster after disaster is caused by applying heavy-handed Federal Government "solutions" to problems better solved by individuals, free markets, or at worst local and state governments.
e-ink isn't suitable for anything that moves, so it's only going to be good for a really basic phone + contacts + text messaging device. Android seems like massive overkill and a waste of battery for those relatively simple tasks. I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on features and inexpensive.
Agreed. I think HN tends to forget another key point: it's just fun! I love "impractical" little things like this, and it's great to see so many people playing around with browser technologies.
Mono 3.0 is out
I cannot tell if a crowd-sourced consititution would be more or less likely to invent a phrase like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
On the other hand, I also design software for a living and despite having used it a large number of times I still find OSX to be (for me) a usability nightmare. I just don't know how to do anything and find the interface completely counterintuitive.

Windows 8 seems just like Windows 7 with an extra layer and I found Windows 7 to be extremely usable. It's all pretty subjective.
> I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.

It already has one, it seems.
I'd never heard of Nginx or Railo CMS open source tools before. I can add that to my oss toolkit!
> The thing to understand about a promise is that monadic operations apply

If that's necessary to understand, then javascript isn't the problem. Most developers do not understand monadic operations.
A similar paper was recently presented at SOCC: http://tinyurl.com/8hgvaq9

This one focuses more on a model for how to take advantage of said heterogeneity, and has a few examples where they actually implement the model on EC2 and see some performance improvements.
Web developers and designers have a tendency to be egocentric about this sort of stuff. We say stuff to ourselves like "How can anybody use this crappy product? You mean like IE over Chrome or Firefox?". The answer is if you don't know any better?.....

To answer your question you need consider the following:

1. Ease of use can be more important that exquisite design - Average person does not value design as much as other things such as ease of use.

$0 site that is easy to build/update and done in hours/days > $$$ for beautifully designed by some flaky web designer/developer that takes 4 months to go live

2. Weebly's Design isn't that bad considering how flexible and forgiving the product has to be.

3. Please show me an example of a comparable product to Weebly that is as easy to use and get live but is significantly better designed?

If such a product exists then the answer might be marketing. Rob Walling of Startups for the Rest of Us Market > Marketing > Design > Product (functionality)

It's sad as a developer to see that Design and Functionality come after market/marketing. It also seems to contradict a bit of my point about ease of use for non techies being a reason for Weebly's success, but if they market well, and it's free then they have a huge leg up.

Really considering what it is Weebly aint too shabby. It's also amazing how many crappy sites there are out there that people continue to utilize. I did some cold calls for my startup idea and I thought the people with crappy sites would certainly get on board, but it didn't quite work out that way.
I'm not able to gather a business model for this - who are their customers, how do they get paid?
Stafford Beer, the architect and excellent storyteller, presenting the cybernetic paradigm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O09FPHuCQQ&feature=youtu...

Also, a quick explanation of the viable system model:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpX7T_sZWMc&feature=youtu...
Really cool. Why so much of the CSS is inline?
Cool. After the menus fluttered down, they felt just a bit too static as rigid rectangles just sitting there.

It'd be cool if you could make them flutter a bit by moving the mouse around or by grabbing and dragging the edges (or some other means).

Think of them as like curtains.

Or perhaps it could be like there is a constant slight breeze, making them move like a curtain in a gentle breeze.

Anyway, just some thoughts.
More off-topic: I wonder why 'interesting' top-level domains like '.it' or '.at' aren't used more frequently to create 'interesting' domain names.

Edit: you.get.it
I don't know when you've looked at Braintree but you can accept credit cards. Just look at here:
https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international

It is not fully international but at least EU and Canada. Another option is PayPal.
Using the DAMA DM-BOK to Drive Data Management Policy- Part 1
Heh... "basic" like "head only", or "6 months only"?
This is a community for geeks. I believe it is a realistic expectation that one should be wary of sharing with tens of thousands of readers sites that run processor-intensive server-side scripts.

(Nice ad hominem, by the way.)
Could someone give more context?
Retention versus frequency for mobile product categories
What you probably don't know about NDAs
IPython notebook of FiveThirtyEight election forecasting model
Some people have looked into this and concluded that even modern computers and algorithms are not sufficient for central planning at a national scale. http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza... (Edit: I see this has already been linked below.)
The title is missleading. I didn't see anywhere in the article that pointed to the "real reason...".
Skype will hit Windows 8 Friday, turn your PC or tablet into a phone
Bill Gates on Windows 8
Clay Christensen, newspapers and the cliff of despair
3 Steps to Setup Cart Abandonment Emails Properly
The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Cars
Producing The Next Generation of Founders
Paul,

That great to hear!

I'm noticing some odd HTTP status codes (like random 404s and 500s). One other interesting idea might be to show the server HTTP header in the UI?

Thanks again,
-Josh
Ask HN: Why is the future of advertising on mobile? 
I spend far more time surfing, researching, and buying on a laptop or desktop than I do on my cell phone or tablet.

The only stuff I've purchased on a mobile device is media -- music, movies, and games.

The main reasons why I don't buy more on my mobile devices are screen size and ease of use.

Also, much of my mobile use is spent doing quick things. My attention span on my mobile devices is very short. To me, it seems like advertisers wouldn't like that.

Perhaps I'm just not seeing something.
Filters render just fine for me in embedded SVG files (I'm using direct embedding via <svg> tag in HTML5 documents). Not all primitives are fully implemented, but performance is definitely better than in Firefox. IE9 does not support filter effects at all, I don't see how WebKit is "lagging" here.
I hadn't! Thanks!
That's really the problem. Windows 7 / 2008 R2 are by far Microsoft's best operating systems yet. Going to be very tough to replace, which is what they seem to be trying to do.
Let me get this straight: A random Google Code Project is illegally hosting an e-book. Author of e-book somehow finds out and creates a nasty bug report demanding a take down?

Wouldn't filing a DMCA in this scenario do the trick? Forgive me, I'm just having a hard time finding this HN newsworthy.
The courier was nothing more than a conceptual note taking device. Do you really think that a dual screen, notebook would have taken off as a consumer electronics device? I don't.

Splitting the Desktop OS with a Surface OS throws out any advantage Microsoft has with Windows. Combining them ensures a large user base for the app marketplace.
Thanks for the comment, pflats. We've seen our fair share of ugly SISes!

Clever actually isn't an SIS, though--we provide an API/integration layer that sits on top of the SIS.

We think SISes are great at a lot of things (state reporting, for example). Providing a nice interface for developers is not one of those things.
I think the problem is that they specified UPS express, which is one of their high speed delivery options (overniight within US, 2-3 days global point-to-point). I'd be perfectly OK with waiting a week for shipping by postal mail, but the Arduino folk don't offer a low-cost option.
Ask HN: How do you split the equity pie?
I've always found very hard and confusing the initial splitting of equity when starting on something with co-founders.

Here is my current situation:
I am a software developer and currently planning to create a web-based product. To do that, I am planning on going into business with a designer and a person who will be responsible of making presentations to potential customers and marketing.

How do I split the company in this case? Do we go 33% each? Or do I try and negotiate a lower percentage since I am starting the whole thing?

I am currently leaning towards splitting the company in 3 since it is an equal risk for everyone and an equal amount of work (sort-of of course). Furthermore, I think by splitting the company in three, we will have a better relationship and better motivation to make this work.

Please share your thoughts and experience on this.
I hope no uppity ladies are watching. Redis dude has a problem with them.
Everywhere outside of North America, this is common.
It's also a problem apple has solved by using a screenshot of the application's default/previous state as the splash screen.
Internet Evolution - Approach Windows 8 With Caution
The optimizations are great to apply to an end result, but the Genetic Programming process probably won't benefit from the expressions being optimized 'along the way' because some of the 'junk' subexpressions allow for more robustness in the face of the genetic operators.

Putting it another way, your highly optimized version (4) is likely to be much more brittle to small 'defects' than (1).
Show HN: Command-line Version of the SeatGeek Web App (with Venue Maps)
L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter
Reliable HTML5 Video Made Easy
Hunter Pence has always been a guy who made up for absolutely terrible baseball knowledge / talent by being a beast of an athlete. I imagine we'll see a rapid drop in his ability as he gets into his early 30s.
>Yes, there are cases like this. But consider: what are the odds of misdiagnosis?

In this case? Zero. She had surgery in which they removed a tumor and some lymph nodes, which were tested and found to be malignant. And, as I pointed out, they had to do DNA testing on the cancer to know if she would benefit from the drug she's taking.

>And these stories are dangerous to the vast majority of (accurately diagnosed) cancer patients who have metastasized and are looking for miracles.

So what are you advocating? That we shouldn't treat people that would potentially benefit from treatment? Five year survival rate for people diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer is a little less than 10%. Those aren't great odds, but on the other hand I wouldn't classify survival as a miracle, either.
AWS issues, affecting Heroku and others
The problem with Windows 8 is that Microsoft built a touch-oriented operating system, but none of the OEMs are shipping machines that are notably more touch-oriented than their Windows 7 lineup. And the Metro aspects of Win8 offer no benefits to a mouse user, while being significantly less discoverable without touch. You just have to watch a few "first time using Windows 8" videos on Youtube to see how unintuitive it is with a mouse.
I think the author is confused about what happens when one publishes on the web.
Well it depends on what your criteria are for 'better'. If you have three bcrypts glued together that each get character%3, there are no blatant flaws, it's just going to give you an oversized hash for the security level you get. And each character will affect only one third of the hash.
Didn't you read the part where he links to a blog post, encouraging people to steal his book?

He was only objecting to the "on google code, where it makes the top 4 search results when you search for my f*ing book"

I suspect he is not the type of copyright holder who enjoys the protection afforded to him by DMCA laws. He just doesn't want to be pissed on his face, please piss on his back only, see?
Show HN: brite, a HTML5 MVC Framework (DOM centric approach to MVC)
I'm really happy that my circle of closest friends all use Path. As a result Path is the social network I use for my best friends, and the other social networks are all the spammy stuff I don't really want to see anyway.
Reddit is Down "network-related issue"
I've used RoR and Node. RoR has a bigger community, so you're likely to find answers faster, and probably provides better job security. You may want to try Ruby/Sinatra, which I prefer over Rails. When you're learning, Sinatra forces you to develop more yourself, so you're more likely to understand what's going on. It's less "magical" than Rails.

Node is better for streaming/real-time applications. You can build any type of web app with it, but it's best known for chat/real-time stuff.

That said, I actually love Node and plan to use it as much as possible, over Ruby/Rails/Sinatra.
Show HN: message_queue: Fast and easy inter-thread message queue
You're understating the benefits and missing a few key ones.

First, the instant purchase ability is extremely important. It means that books gain some measure of equality with other forms of media (the internet, movies/tv, music). With a Kindle I can read whatever book I want whenever I want, which means that I read many more books than I used to.

Second, the mobility advantage isn't slight at all, especially for people who read a lot. If you're never carrying more than a single book around that's one thing, but I read 1-2 books a week, and a lot more (often 5+ a week) if I'm traveling. Even just during my daily commute, it's far easier to read while standing on the subway with a Kindle instead of a book.

Beyond that, I find reading on a Kindle to be far more comfortable than reading a book. The actual reading experience is much nicer than trade paperbacks, which are printed very cheaply. It's much lighter and only requires one hand to hold/turn pages, so I can more easily read while lying down, and the newest version has a very nice backlight, so that I can read in bad lighting.

There are obvious disadvantages, and I absolutely hate that DRM is still a thing, but the benefits absolutely outweigh any possible disadvantages for me. Anecdotally, it's the difference between me reading 5-10 books a year and me reading 50-100 books a year, and I'm a much happier person in the latter state.

--

Also, if you're not saying something to be rude, you should actually write like that, not add a disclaimer at the top of what you're writing. There were a lot of ways to get the same message across without calling people idiots.
Since media shaming only solves the problem for one person, I think it makes things worse in the long term. For every customer who gets un-screwed by Amazon, how many screwed customers do we not know about?
I've been using it as my primary OS on both my home and work desktop (as well as on several tablets - I work for Microsoft) for about the last year. The biggest issue I had with it at first was my perspective on what the native environment is. If you treat the metro home screen as the native environment, and the desktop as a secondary environment, your desktop experience wont be pleasant. While it's fine and dandy to use it the majority of the time if you're on a tablet, on a desktop those interactions don't make as much sense. When I started to use the metro home screen as purely a launcher on my desktop, things became great. I came from a linux background so I really missed the integration that alt+f2 had when I moved to windows (or spotlight if you're an OSX guy). Metro as an alt+f2/spotlight alternative is absolutely fantastic. Winkey+type anything and you're where you want to be. It really grows on you, and I'm honestly more productive on win8 now than I am on win7.
As for the Metro apps, on a desktop I've found that they serve a nice purpose if you have multiple screens. I really enjoy having my mail + calendar metro apps up on one screen while I do work on my others. Just my perspective on things, which again may be heavily biased as I work on Windows.
Somebody wrote a book. A pdf copy of said book is being hosted illegally in a google code site. The author asked for it to be taken down via a bug report on that google code site.

I think the point is that it is a fairly humorous method to ask for something to be taken down (vs. standard legal channels). Plus the author apparently has some fairly "progressive" views on pirating.
How to Answer Prospective Customer Questions
Seriously 20g? I bet you didn't read all of them!
The app is really cool, there's lots of room for design flair with this.

I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.

I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.
Really? Click on the issue link (article), then once you've read it, click on the Downloads link. There is Manning 2009 Art of Unit Testing, and some random thai/viet filenames that go along with the rest of the project, which seems to contain nothing original -- but I can't say for sure, I don't talk thai.
> This is less of a problem when he patient has been paying into the system his/her entire life,

That argument ignores the opportunity cost of doing other things with the citizen's money, obfuscates the actual lifetime cost of healthcare, and is just an inherently Liberty-reducing due to a lack of opt-out.

> the premiums of which are not subject to profit margins or administrative inefficiencies

Which large long-term government programs can we refer to that are efficient? I'd be really surprised if you could name even one of significance.
This reminds me of the recent post analyzing top HN stories statistically. One of the conclusions was that having profanity in the title helped your article do better; I can't help thinking that this is a very illustrative example of that observation in action.
Well, it is your stuff, so I can only wish you the best of luck. And I sincerely hope that you will not come to regret this at a later age, as someone who 'lost all his stuff' on two occasions I can tell you that even after two decades you can still miss physical objects with no real value beyond the sentimental. Memories can be triggered in powerful ways by objects, both good and bad. Living without such triggers will make your memories fade, as though erasing not just a part of your past, but also of yourself.

Take good care.
You're confusing e-books with Kindle books. You can still buy a ton of DRM free books online. You can even buy DRM free .mobi (Kindle) books.

PS: Calling someone "idiot" is never a good way to start a discussion. Especially when you're wrong.
The amazing Italian legal system strikes again...
Not stealing if their own system allows it.
Hi Helen, I didn't use a template - it's just a bog standard Open Office document and exported as a PDF :)
Square is planning to have 1,000 employees by the end of 2013
I wouldn't say it makes things worse in the long term, but it certainly helps. I do not think that it is good that it has to be done this way, but it seems that at the moment this is often the only way to make something happen at all.
I think his response is more emotional. He spent a couple of years writing the book and I think he expected people to have the decency to ask for permission before posting it.

Regardless, hes a smart guy. He knows people steal - let him vent.
Actually, DRM at its finest. Until enough people get screwed by DRM, the R from DRM will come from Rights instead of Restrictions.

Unfortunately, I see no shortage for stories like this in the future.
Heroku API Offline
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1076 $50 US plus shipping.
It is humorous. I clicked, I up voted. Seems perfectly fine for HN
If we're talking like that, doesn't south Italy get Redis?
Here is the translated version of the project description

"software management bookseller - 2 projects subject Software Quality Assurance

The you group 03 note:

- The TestResult in the Trunk folder to store the resulting Excel file Test Unit

- Folder Test Unit in the trunk to store source code test unit

Part of you does that person's post into the right folder

The assignments are in the Document you to view and download

- In a work assignment you fill out to complete his term and then update, and the completion of the self assessment and complete performance of work done on the assignment offline

Good Luck :)"
Another widespread AWS outtage this morning
Coming from a *nix background, it seems odd to me that a kernel null dereference would be exploitable from userland. Or that kernel functions be directly addressable from userland.

Is kernel memory mapped into user processes on Windows?
Well, to be fair, he only did that as a response to the guy publishing his book on google code. I don't think there would be a post about it otherwise.

edit: didn't see the date of the post. Thought the "yesterday" in question was actually a twitter post from yesterday.
There's a difference between "implemented" and "working".

Here's an example of the combination of PNG Transparence (in since version 1) and ShadowBlur (in for quite some time), both of which work on their own, but not in combination:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100703

There are still lots of issues like this one, with limitless combinations of feature1, feature2, browser vendor to choose from that make working with vector graphics on the web several orders of magnitude more painful than simply throwing a .png up there and calling it done.
Amazon EBS Instances in US-East-1 experiencing problems
Our database servers that rely on EBS drives are experiencing major performance issues. Looks like an EBS outage strikes again...
Not agreeing or disagreeing with you, as I have no idea about this, but I'm not sure being Italian is evidence that you are an expert on Italian corruption...
I've been looking at several uCs, in particular the Cypress Semi PSoC5 system for the system-on-chip functionality and the great toolchain, but also the very cheap TI Stellaris series. But there are so many highly capable products out there these days, it's hard to know which one is the best; I feel like a first-time computer buyer trying to choose between Mac and Windows without really knowing much about either.

Are there any resources you'd recommend for people trying to choose their development platform? I have specific reasons for liking the cypress system-on-chips (massive i/o, extensive software config capabilities, toolchain support for my intended application of audio/MIDI), but it's hard to size up all the different options.