skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Red states / districts have significantly lower population per area, education levels, and incomes etc. However, the republican party is vary heavily influenced by it's donors which tend to be either retired or affluent. From this perspective you can see why so many of there policy's are setup to hurt the vast majority of their voters.
Okay sure, it supports rampant materialism, but it's not the typical disposable consumerism that is clearly a problem for the environment and the future of the species. Wanting your stuff to be good could actually combat the current momentum.

Whether you're defined by it is a deeper question that I don't think is answered simply by someone's care and attention to what they purchase. What if you define yourself by not owning anything at all? Is that better? Because you're still defining yourself by the same metric.
Great info! I'll try examining the cookie next time I encounter one.
Actually as an app developer I see this as a huge monetization opportunity to me. With a huge installed base of Windows, if I get my app running on some those with the ads powering my app? It's a mouth watering proposition.
I agree that the market exist for a no-ad, reasonably cost version of program X.

I guess what I'm getting at is how do you try software without 30-day trials, ad-supported free versions, or having to pay a hefty price without test driving?

Is there a better way?
I don't understand why there is so much talk of this article being so very materialistic. It's kind of the mentality of a good number of individuals who did or are wanting to try a very minimalistic style of travel (others exist obviously: ignore certain needs (for me: don't bring a computer; for others: only the clothes on your back); buy and throw away each time you're somewhere new (only works in certain areas of the world with certain high budgets); etc. This however is the majority view point for vagabonding. Invest in key items that meet your exact needs (knowing your needs is an important aspect of this). If you do this beforehand you won't be stuck in some country without a passport because it fell out of the hole in your siblings old backpack.

If you ignore the anecdote about flatware you realize that the article describes minimalism at it's core. Ensuring all your needs are met with the minimal amount of goods. There is one flaw with this concept of "The Best" that individuals who follow this mantra tend to lose sight of another very important aspect - time. While Daniel Curtis clearly showed his obsession by buying 20 different sets to determine which is the best for him. I imagine that others don't have that amount of time to invest in this decision.

I am this way with most purchases; if you have something that will significantly improve the quality of life you have or something that while not necessarily a need but has moved to a desired addition to your lifestyle, spend the time to find the best fit for you. If it is not worth the time to look for what is the best fit for you; don't purchase it because you merely want it.
I like to optimize, but also optimize on price. In ~2007, I felt proud to buy a $21500 new Lincoln LS V8 (loaded) which I bought for $23k less than sticker the day they got discontinued, in UAE, since it was essentially a Jaguar S-Type. It made me happier than buying a $45k stripped BMW would have.

I also put a lot of effort into getting great headphones, great keyboard, etc., and a chair that I like.

I didn't put weeks of research into buying bowls. I saw they were cheap on slickdeals, noticed I needed bowls, and bought some on sale. I don't really research who makes the best bottled water at Costco, I just get whatever is cheap at the time.

Pick your battles.
Excellent point. In that case he only had one state outside his given margin of error in West Virginia.

I didn't do any error analysis aside from asking if it was within his margin of error, and all but one were. Hawaii was also exactly on the line.

http://pastebin.com/0RB5GRjQ
I know a startup who spent 18 months and all their investment capital on outsourced development. When the code wasn't up to standards they used expensive consultants to fix the code. They ultimately decided to hire development staff but couldn't add new features without breaking the existing product.

It is a good little business but failed because of bad management decisions and poorly built software.

Contact me if you want more details.
I don't see how spending quality time with imperfect people can't be better when we have perfect items we can depend on.
You're completely right. There's good evidence to show that customers are actually less satisfied after comparison shopping to that extent.

http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/jtaer/v4n3/art08.pdf
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

It should also stand to reason that the opportunity cost behind researching the best is absurd.
The default in the intellectual property world should be that there is no protection.

Perhaps the manufacturing process by which the device can be made so thin is original.

The physical design of the iPad is not original enough to justify any patent protection, i.e.: none is in the interests of consumers.

It is quite plain, and quite similar to other devices.
So agreed. And interesting thread you've spawned here. Pretty easy to separate the people I'd like to have a beer with from the people I wouldn't mind never speaking to... ever. :)
You must not be familiar with the Author. Let's just say He's extremely bullish on Facebook.
I think tons might be a slight exaggeration, if you restrict it to visual builders targeting Bootstrap, there's 2 publicly available alternatives. Both of those in BETA, all 3 look promising.
I am definitely not confusing the two. My entire point is you can't look at the colors of Nate's map and the colors of the results map and say he got 50/50 because Nate's map is explicitly predicting some probability of a win in each state. They may be color coded but his prediction in a given state wasn't "Obama wins" or "Romney wins" but was instead "there is an x% chance that Obama wins.". My point relies entirely on my understanding that what was predicted in the big map is a percentage chance, not a result and not a vote share.

I may be communicating poorly but I feel I made that distinction clear in my post where I say "he predicted a 50.3% chance of an Obama win", "he had Obama at 79.4% chance to win", "makes me wonder if we really had enough data to justify such a large %". That last one is ambiguous but in the context it means "such a large % chance to win."

I don't know how to better clarify my post other than to restate that I am confident I am not confusing the two.

My point was simply that when a longshot comes in or is close to coming in, it's possible you were wrong about it being a longshot. It doesn't mean you were, but it's the first place to look for continued analysis.

I didn't know until just a few moments ago that Nate also had his vote share predictions on the blog. I've just compared all of those to the actual results and found only one state to be outside of his given margin of error.

http://pastebin.com/0RB5GRjQ
Thanks Eli, we've actually been shipping for the past several months but it's good to get such a large new feature out the door none the less.

This is great feedback, we've definitely struggled with how to present building up a document in HTML to people who don't understand HTML. If you're purely a designer or a product manager you'll most likely to use the other aspects of Easel which allow you to position elements absolutely and style their CSS properties with the inspector on the right.

The bootstrap feature is aimed more specifically at developers and designers who are HTML and CSS savvy. We've found that there are many people out there who are interested in designing responsive application. While they can "design in the browser" with code they've found into inhibiting their creative process.

We've built this feature to allow those savvy designers to get back to what they do best, design and not code. It sounds like we're in the right direction and with the right mix of introduction, learning and clarification it will be alot easier to use.

Thanks again for taking the time to try things out and for giving us such honest feedback.
I think your second point is right on. These are beautified websites that contain really unobtrusive ads, the "apps" just being a bookmark pinned to the start screen. I'd rather have that then a cluttered website in a web-browser with obtrusive ads. Though, in my use-case, I'm mainly in the desktop away from those apps, anyway.
"Do you have vegetarian options?" or "Does this food have eggs in it?", perhaps. (I know a few foreigners who carry business-card sized printouts with an explanation saying "Hello! The person who handed you this can't speak Japanese. She has an extremely serious medical allergy to eggs or anything containing eggs.")
I've been using Jetstrap and Divshot for 2 weeks on a small project. Of the two so far, I've found Divshot has more features and ease of use, yet Jetstrap is very good in its own right. I want to try Easel and I signed up, but the site seemed to be overwhelmed (by Show HN?) and it failed to load for me.

Surely we want competitors in this area, there's obviously a need for it and a number of tools competing on features and price can be good for consumers?
Cool problem. I LOVE optimization problems like this, lol. A good "start up" kind of idea too. Scheduling ambulances. Requires not just optimizing for streets, etc., but for time, times of night there are more calls, etc. Requires forecasting, historical data, and so on. Really a very cool problem. In a nutshell, you need a probablistic model of what times have more calls, and where these are likely to come from, and spread out your buses accordingly. Perfect for machine learning solutions. You could have a neural net to give you your probablistic model, then some kind of cost-based heuristic to make decisions based upon the model and real-time data. The coolest problems are the ones with no one right answer, but with "better" and "worse" answers, because, well, they are just more fun, lol. Contact me at FrankErdman2000 AT yahoo dot com if you want to discuss more - I can't get into too many details on a public forum due to things like NDA etc. :-) Put bus scheduling or something in subject line. Seriously though, thanks for this post. Anything to prevent boredom. :-)
Props for the URL - http://dcurt.is/the-best

My bet is he dreamed up the title and then wrote an entire meaningless post just to sneak it in. Y'all just been trolled good.
Both are city states, they are hardly countries and much of their success is by proximity to countries where taxes aren't low (PRC, Malaysia).

Also, neither HK or Singapore are very cheap. You don't pay taxes, you just pay more. A car in Singapore, for example, is around $100K every 5 or 6 years.

I'm very tired of Americans complaining about taxes when they have one of the lowest tax burdens in the world along with the lowest cost of living based on value.
Oh! I thought it changed the alarm time. A technically adept friend recently complained about this happening with his Android phone - the 8am alarm went off at 7am - so I had that in mind, though it seems like I was misreading here. Sorry about that.
Its full of good info, but most of the time now, i'd just put persona and be done with it
This makes me want to A/B test all the interfaces I work on.
MyRedis and Redis To Go are 64 bit according to redis-cli info, I'm looking into the others as well but I'm guessing they will all be 64 bit.
How to talk to recruiters at a career fair
This does not belong in the top spot on Hacker News. Quality stuff is nice to own, woop-dee-fucking-doo.

Just because Dustin Curtis wrote it, doesn't mean you instantly gotta hit that tiny little triangle. I very much doubt this little article would have collected more than 10 upvotes if it were written by some 20-year old that happened to stumble upon r/minimalism.

I've seen a few of his articles now that are upvoted mindlessly and don't have the slightest relation to technology or startups. It makes me a little bit mad.
I love this post so much. Please upvote onto front page so more people can be made aware that Apple and Siri exists, and they are the bestest.
How diseases are transmitted via Social Media
Will they start?
Terminator Style Prosthetic Arm
Really interesting in the concept, specific color choices aside, it's a great point that general portrayal really bifurcates states along partisan boundaries when they're really pretty close proportionally... Honestly the whole bipartisan system is a joke, the illusion of choice.
Yea but that's the subsidized option, you can buy the same kindle without ads but it costs slightly more.
(disclaimer: I work at dotCloud)

You can actually break down the security issue into 2 distinct problems:

Problem 1: unauthorized access.

If an unauthorized client can issue redis commands, you're screwed. One way to prevent that is to block all network trafic to redis, except for a whitelist of trusted clients. As explained above this is not possible on a PaaS because a) your application containers share source IPs with other, untrusted containers, and b) those source IPs may change at any time as your containers are moved around.

However, there's another way: using a master password. With this optional feature, Redis can be configured to authenticate all queries with a single statically-defined password. You have to use it well: specifically, make it long enough to sustain brute-force attacks, and be careful where you store it. Luckily, dotCloud (and presumably other redis providers) implements these best practices for you so you can benefit from the security.

Problem 2: trafic interception.

Redis does not support encryption, so if Alice can eavesdrop on the network, she can intercept and possibly forge Redis commands. If you can't trust EC2's network, this means you can't use Redis on EC2 at all (independently of problem 1), unless you implement end-to-end SSL encryption with something like stunnel. However, it's more likely that you, like the majority of EC2 customers, already have to trust their network anyway. In that case, you're probably Ok using Redis on EC2 and therefore on dotCloud.

So, to summarize:

- A well-engineered PaaS (and specifically dotCloud) protects you from unauthorized access

- If you can tolerate the risk that your public cloud provider (or somebody who hacked them) intercepting network trafic, you can use Redis on a PaaS. Otherwise you need to implement your own service with end-to-end encryption (keeping in mind that your public cloud provider also has access to encryption keys stored on disk and memory)
Good question. From my (limited) perspective, I see nothing wrong with time/feature-limited trials. It's the free food sample at the store. If it's good, it makes me want to buy. If it doesn't, I carry on. Works for me.

And I don't even necessarily see ad-supported free versions as the worst option. A lot of developers find the paid version winds up getting them far more revenue, and from better customers, which magnifies the gains. So if that's a good gateway for them, great, and if that's a good filter by which to learn that they should ditch the free version, even better.

I don't love it. I think a truly enlightened society would look for better ways to connect customers with the products they'd enjoy and find value in, but having an ad-supported version plus a paid version, seems to be a step in the right direction. One could argue that's what's being done by networks who broadcast their shows for free and sell them on iTunes/Amazon, but I'd like it if: they came out at the same time, and if it wasn't clear the ad-supported model is largely necessary because most of their products are garbage, and they rely on the big hits to subsidize their general lack of taste. (Same goes for the music industry.)

Now, I've made donations to sites that disable the ads for donors, and I get why they do that. I don't judge the guys who see an ad-supported version as their only potential way of gaining some traction (though I might not always agree with that assessment). They're scrappy, and doing what they have to.

What I think really drives me nuts is this frantic, 90s-like gold rush push for the ability to corner the market on every square inch at which eyeballs point, with the aim towards placing corporate sponsorship there. And hey, for the square-inches that aren't digital, let's put glasses between your eyes and it!

(Don't get me wrong, wearable displays will be massively useful, and massively 'disruptive,' to use the local dialect, but I'd just as soon get mine from someone who wants to make a really good one, and sell it to me for a profit, and then carry on designing the next, even better one, as opposed to spending most of their time thinking about how to monetize my life even more. But that's probably just me.)
There's also security through obscurity. If you use "requirepass" AND rename the "auth" command to something only the client knows (yes...you can rename commands in redis), then you could potentially "partially" secure the instance even more (although someone can basically DOS your server attempting to "auth").
She laughed in a 'lovely' way. But, it feels great to know she will not hesitate to shove truth in my face. It makes me more confident actually, couples dynamics are one complex thing. :D

We are not ready to have real users, this is why we didn't put the website out there yet (not because we are special or in 'stealth mode') Some changes we are making causes users to loose all their data. Also, I'll be way too embarrassed to show it around right now.
Oh look, it's recoiledsnake and cooldeal...

I don't mean to be rude, but you all show up in any thread related to Microsoft defending anything and everything they do. It gets old, and while I can understand it seems HN is against MSFT, there is no conspiracy.

My current industry is obsessed with .Net, I use a dumb phone still, and I don't have any horse in the race specifically, but I truly feel these discussions get turned into gadget blog-like flamewars by the likes of you.

I simply don't understand why 'you' seem to care about this topic so much. Personally, I'm contemplating my first 'smartphone' and I would like to understand the trade-offs( it looks like custom Android ROM at the moment), but reading obviously biased comments from either side just makes me sad.

Edit: I don't think any of these $100B industries needs help defending themselves, and if anyone discussing the topic is compensated for their contribution it would be nice to have some disclosure.
I think this line did it for me:

> I trusted my wallet to hold cash, boarding passes, and IDs without deforming or falling apart, and it did.

Imagine the chaos if my wallet started deforming!

My wallet was some random wallet I bought at WalMart for $10, and I'm always worrying, "is the cash I put in my wallet going to stay there?" Sometimes, it just quantum tunnels right through the wallet into my pocket! It's anarchy!
As an uneducated observer, what I understand is, to infringe on a patent, you need to infringe on every single claim in the patent.

Was looking at the patent and your website, and it doesn't appear as if you might infringe on the final claim:

20. The system of claim 19, wherein the computer is integrated into at least one of an audio system, a video system, and a message board of a sporting event to trigger content elements at times of sporting event milestones based on the production schedule.

Clearly that haven't patented rundown software - that has existed forever. Their invention seems to be to use rundown software to drive multiple screens in a sporting arena.

That said, you need a lawyer.
You're on Hacker News, but you think that destroying jobs with technological innovation is a bad thing?
(Based on "as an Italian") how are you dealing with visa issues? My good grad school friends all had issues with that transition. Many of them are slaving away at MegaCorps until they get green cards.
i think this is an incredible post. We rarely embrace the art and quality it takes to build things that we use everyday (toothbrushes, wallets, backpacks, forks, etc.), but in search for them, you encounter people that built them and an incredible story behind them.

Very inspiring to strive to surround yourself with best of everything.
Maybe you could also thing about Web Applications. You have skills, have't you ?

There is lot's of framework like for native apps. But maybe you have good reason to finally want to learn mobile app development.
OpenHack: 17 cities strong and counting
If any AirBNB people are reading this thread please do something similar to this when the rebuilding effort begins. A lot of the "Habitat or Humanity"-esque rebuilding projects need places to put volunteer workers. There are only so many free beds in churches.
Sweden Needs More Trash, Because It Has Turned All It's Got Into Energy
I always thought it was tied to the creative's dilemma: what we can imagine is amazing, yet always just beyond what we actually produce. So by the time you produce something amazing it's "old news"... and your imagination has grown 10 steps ahead.
Irregular Warfare: Fielding and Phasing in the Venture Capital Green Beret
I enjoyed this little post as I really related to what he wrote, and the graphs were funny and accurate, but I think he put a bit too much emphasis on "unhappy", which I believe is not accurate. I, and other entrepreneurs I know, are not Always Unhappy. It's more like Never Happy For Long. During the upswing on the graph, I am extremely happy! Ecstatic! But then even though business (let's say) has doubled almost overnight, a month or so will go by with no new growth, and I'm just miserable, wondering how I can make something happen.

I would chalk this up to the human tendency to always want the next thing, or always want what one doesn't have. And that personality type I think is a perfect fit for a self driven risk taker entrepreneur types.
I often got lost in Japan, and ask random strangers to show me where to go on a gps map, or show an address in an email or have them look at instructions etc.
It might not work in other countries, but in japan it's very smooth.

Apart form that, I think the presence of the Yes/No buttons is very thoughtful. You don't want a stranger to have to think about the kind of answer you're asking for.
Stack Overflow answers are copyleft
How to find Principle of Big success for your Business?
I can't be the only one that finds a "clever" domain name to feel less serious and trustworthy.

I might not be in a demographic that matters, but I do wonder about the numbers.