skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole point of a price comparison site is that it is unbiased. They show you several options and give you the information you need to decide which one to go for. Yes comparison websites act as lead generation but they make sense for both parties. The customer only needs to enter their details into a single place, while the insurers get leads from people who might have otherwise stopped their search after getting their third quote.

What does it mean to display 'unbiased' quotes to customers? I tried to visit Leaky's site but it appears to be down.
Sorry about that, I couldn't figure out a way to make it a hyperlink.
It imported v11 projects just fine for me.
Paul Desmond wrote 'Take Five'. For an example of Brubeck's masterful "great code", check out "Blue Rondo a la Turk". Genius.
a lot of people know his album "time out", with "Take Five", but the quartet got a lot wilder than that. My favorite record is "Jazz At Oberlin", Dave really plays some different stuff entirely, the interplay is fantastic.
My aunt used to eat antifreeze and motor oil with her french fries and she lived to 103.
Plugin to create multiple fixed panels that unroll with a nice effect
I bet it's some kind of portal that aggregates other content that you're not directly responsible for.
Your post illustrates an anger common to computer enthusiasts who hate the idea of appliance computing because it takes aways their feeling of master over the system. Real people don't care about "giving tremendous monopolistic power to corporations". They don't see it that way. They see it as an easier-to-use computer and think you're weird for wanting something more complicated out of principle.
One of the new features is better performance, particularly with indexing: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

It might be worthwhile to give it a try just for that feature alone.
Facebook: This Is The Bet You Are Making
By the "slightly older version", which version number do you mean?
I just tried Prismatic, and was perplexed when it started giving me lots of news about central England. Huh?

Then it hit me: I live in Durham, NC. I hadn't told it that, but it probably deduced it from my IP. And somewhere in its great NLP brain, Durham, NC and Durham England are being mixed up.

Ah, the perils of AI.
My experience in academia thus far: for every five smart people abandoning academia for industry, one truly brilliant person remains behind. That's all that is required for the model to sustain. (And even then, there are not enough academic jobs to go around.)
If these businesses were "safe" bets, there would be no need for the government to step in - the capital markets would queue up to provide.

Government loans and subsidies like this only make sense exactly when they are for high risk ventures where what they provide may be very unlikely to provide a good direct return on the initial investment itself, but where the potential societal benefits in the long term can be great (e.g. improved environment, or kickstarting an entirely new market).
Congrats Anil! We're excited for ArchiveSocial's progress!
ahh hacker news never fails, great feedback from all, which further proves the quality of contributors here...

i don't agree it is with luck that people find hacker news, sure some percentage do, but do these people recognize the tremendous value of hacker news when they come across it?...probably not most.

if ones does enough reading/research on the web about things related to computers, programming, science, engineering, or technology, they are almost certain to stumble across hacker news and recognize its value...so it is more statistics related to the time a person spends trying to innovate and learn using the web...and these are the people I want on hacker news because selfishly I learn the most from them..and I hope vice versa...

elitist? The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources? I do not think hacker news readers/contributors deserve special/favoured treatment. I do think hacker news readers/contributors are in the higher percentile of intellect, but not necessarily in social status or financial resources.

private? Am I excluding people? No, I just choose not to advertise it, I prefer they find it on their own and recognize its value because I feel it provides a litmus test to the type of people that make this forum so great. But I would never shun or try and forbid anyone from advertising Hacker news...I was just interested in peoples opinion on the matter...so thank you.

i mean how did reddit get so bad, that place is horrible, i would hate it if this happened to hacker news...but then again i would probably keep using the web to learn, innovate, and grow and more than likely stumble onto the next hacker news...
Free Shipping Day (17 Dec) is bigger than Black Friday - $1bn sales last year
I'm amazed at what is being claimed in the headline/description in this article versus what the paper actually has demonstrated (from the brief description in the article/reading the abstract online) - I actually wondered whether the original poster was intending to highlight this disparity.
First, the conclusion of the researchers is that having more cigarette butts in a nest correlates with having fewer parasitic mites, but this article states that chemicals in cigarette butts are already known to repel mites. Wouldn't one expect a correlation here? Of course, it's by no means a given, and experiment is required to bear out this conclusion, but it seems like nobody should come away surprised.
Second, a correlation here is completely independent from the conclusion that "city birds use cigarette butts" as anything beyond building material! It leaves open this possibility but as far as I can tell the question of intent is entirely unaddressed by the current research.
I already know not to expect more from pop-sci research highlights, but I would have though Nature would do better.
I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars
generated per person" is the only valid measure of the
success of a government

Sure, it isn't the only measure of success, but if this number is very low then that is (I would argue) a measure of failure. "Dollars generated per person" = tax-revenues per person is very similar to GDP-per-capita. And a high GDP-per-capita means you can spend on healthcare, earthquake proof buildings, and all kinds of standard-of-living improving stuff.

So how do you factor in all the other measures of success
in such an evaluation?

I think that many -- not all -- are downstream of dollars generated per person. The more dollars per person, the more money for science, for public works, for roads and bridges, for charity, for whatever you want. You can't buy love, but you can buy most of the lower level items in Maslow's hierarchy, no?

Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the
ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of
business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough
profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral
obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose
purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash.
Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will
never make a profit, and governments are the major
organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that
are often left to such pursuits.

Sure. But I guess my claim is that in order to pursue those other "lines of business", governments must still post a profit (more tax/fees than expenditures). The alternate school of thought (promoted by Cheney and Krugman alike) says that deficits don't matter and that governments cannot go bankrupt.

[I might also quibble with your use of the term "amoral" to describe businesses and "moral" to describe governments, as most of the millions of people dead in the 20th century were killed by governments. You have to kind of go back to the East India Company to find something comparable for businesses (and even that was a public/private hybrid). Anyway, digression, my apologies.]
No surprise here, Facebook didn't buy Instagram for their crappy image filters.
To most entrepreneurs, it’s a total snooze, which is precisely why his company is positioned for success. The company solves a problem that is, to use a banker word, “unsexy.” It’s one that few people want to tackle: insurance buying.

I am sorry to sound harsh, but statements like this make me question the ability of the author to evaluate companies and their products, as well as the judgement of the Pando editors who gave this version of the article the green light.

The fact that it targets an unsexy market has little bearing on how well it does over the long term. One could even argue that any unsexy market that involves lots of money changing hands will attract lots of entrepreneurs, which could negatively impact the success of this venture (competitive pricing, ability to attract investment, etc.).
Feel free to ask anything, but really we would love to get feedback on the idea / site etc. We're just getting started
Verizon patenting DVR that monitors for cuddling
Congrats, Anil!
Since virtualized IO is slower, and since developers often pay a premium to get faster compile times, I don't think virtualized development environments are very productive unless a dev can't get a bare-metal box for the target OS environment.
Over 6 years (July 2006 according to archive.org) is a 'relative newcomer'? You're hard to please :)

Their API took a long time to arrive, but we've used it for disabling checks during maintenance events pretty effectively.

As mentioned in the article, POST/PUT requests are on the list of Things I Want though. Would be good to be able to group a bunch of checks together into a service too.
Ask HN: AIO tool for dev profile/blog/etc? 
Is there a good all-in-one tool for managing your profile, listing your projects and comes with a solid blogging platform?

What do you use? Links to your web profile would be helpful.

Thanks!
Not quite--this is more a recreation of the Flash Portal clone. i.e. it's all 2D graphics and 2D physics.

I got my hopes up for a moment, preparing to be awestruck. Since I have a TI-89, that's what I think of when I hear "graphing calculator". My TI-89 can do 3D stuff (for instance this fun maze generator game http://www.ticalc.org/pub/89/asm/games/amaz89.zip), it would blow my mind to have anything close to a Portal 3D engine on it.

It's still awesome but not as mindblowing as the title suggests...
I am proud to have paid him homage by naming my web framework after him. He deserves so much more.
To me, it feels like this person's talent is wasted on this project. With such a strong background in natural language processing, why isn't this person involved in a Siri competitor, in Web real time chat, VOIP compression, or AI speech? Is this the limited scope at which a typical CS Ph.D operates?

Reach for the stars. Let people of lesser ability make news apps, even if it's a struggle for them.
Can you explain how other comparison websites try to encourage you to pick one company over another without providing a benefit (i.e. cheaper price or better cover) to the customer?

Also, I understand that most comparison websites will not quote from every insurer and that there are now almost as many comparison websites as there are insurers. How will you be able to attract partnerships from more insurers than anyone else has done so far?
You're a bit off in your chronology. Swing was big up through the late 40s - Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington dominated the charts.

Bebop didn't really take over until the post war years.
And as Go lacks both exceptions and Maybe/Option type, chaining or computation expressions will look more clumsy. I am still a Go beginner and am wondering if idiomatic Go designs programs in a different way to make up for this.
It's easy to see the commercial value here. Saves time, saves tons of hassle, creates more transparency. Raises the question... why are so many people talking about "Trout Fishing" in North Carolina :)
Reddit-apps are allowed.
What's your issue? Points are valueless you know.
A retrospective of Brubeck's career by Minnesota Public Radio, with video clips of some of Brubeck's performances:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns...
What's with people complaining about the front page today? This is really cool and it saves somebody out there some work, that's value and that's worth an upvote.
I’m 33. I "discovered" Brubeck four or five years ago, primarily wearing out Jazz Impressions of New York while looking to detox a bit from a year of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis.

In April 2011 my wife and I took a train from South Carolina to Washington D.C. to catch one of Dave's four sold out shows at Blues Alley. I paid more money than I had ever paid to see a concert, knowing this would likely be my only chance to ever see him live. He played an amazing set, with minimal onstage banter, giving his players plenty of room to shine during their solos.

He ended the set with a few of his more well-known standards, and then—just before leaving the stage—simply said, “They’ve got me on oxygen. But I made it through the whole set without needing the damn thing.”

Class act.
I love the board's minimalistic approach - excellent job!
That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind of article selection from my personal data.

But worse, after 15 minutes of mostly dismissing these kinds of articles (and clicking on anything even remotely interesting), it was still mostly giving results in these kinds of categories. Is this the wrong way to use the site? I have no idea, since there are no usage instructions anywhere.

Right now it needs to be way more aggressive about early negative signals, and introduce more variety rather than try yet another pro-sport article to check whether I'd be more interested in that than the previous 10. Because it's hard to believe that a lot of users are going to persist if the initial results are persistently bad, no matter how pretty the typography.
Your Easter Bloc examples are a pretty good case against planned economies under oppressive dictatorial regimes, not against government grants to provide incentives for the market to move in certain directions.

> Then it's not a fair fight anymore

That's missing the point. Government interventions of the type in this thread are aimed at providing a fighting chance for the guy that doesn't have the money for a gym or a trainer, to see if his unorthodox ideas of how to fight will actually prove to be worth anything.

There might very well be arguments against these types of interventions, but it will have to be a different argument than against what we usually consider bailouts.

Bailouts for failed businesses employing well established existing technology is an entirely different beast.
Why'd you want to know who unfollowed you?
Talk about wishful thinking. You claim the commonly cited numbers are too low without any source, and then you go on to claim that when people "grow out of" OS X and Windows (implying that they're simplistic operating systems for children), they install Linux. Sheer fantasy.

It's been over 15 years, and the Year of Linux on the Desktop has not arrived. It's okay to accept that, on the desktop, it is a hobbyist operating system for UNIX enthusiasts. That's not an insult to Linux. It's just reality. What few non-geeks there are using Linux on the desktop are usually rare exceptions whose computers are set up by a Linux advocate in the family.
I understood this to mean that this is a gap in the market and hence the company has a higher chance of meeting some market demand. I'm not sure if that's how you understood it but I agree that it could have been better editorialised.
This looks more like a standard 2d platformer.
Schmidt: Microsoft will never be as cool as the Gang of Four
You do realize that the first line of my comment was a quote from the parent?
incredibly cool to see this live and makes you realize the market potential.
Dave Brubeck took a stand against racism and would refuse to play in segregated venues. He turned down offers to perform in South Africa because of ordinances that prohibited racially mixed groups. He apparently started one the first racially integrated bands in the U.S. army during WW II.

We lost a musical genius and a good human being.
U.N. body adopts Internet eavesdropping techniques
There are lots of UI problems involved with car insurance - some are (in my opinion) actually fairly interesting. In established comparison markets outside the US the big players invest a lot of money in getting the user experience right so that users complete the process (there is a large drop-off).

By far the easiest way to solve this is to do a registration plate lookup: however, I don't know if this is even possible in the US, and it would be on a state-by-state level so a bit of a nightmare. In countries like the UK, where there is a single source of plates that companies can buy access to, it's a lot easier.

Leaky could probably learn a far bit from how insurance quotation engines in the EU and other less complex markets handle this. Here in the UK there are many well established players doing what Leaky do, probably with more success (which is totally down to the fact the UK insurance market is much more centralised).
Navy Lays Off Dolphins, Replaces With Robots
My problem with car insurance is not the price, but what happens when you need to make a claim. Any company can undercut any other on premiums, but you only truly find out what happens when making a claim.

There are attempted frauds, people expecting coverage that they didn't actually pay for, misunderstandings etc which means every insurance provider has a website detailing how they suck and treat people badly. And of course the insurance company doesn't want to pay out more than it should.

Premium price is amongst the last things I consider because of this.

Here is an example site for Farmers Insurance and ultimately what led to me dropping them: http://farmersreallysucks.com/

You'll note they mention software from CSC named Colossus and to stay away from companies using it. Software rules does mean standardization, but also means virtually no case specific leeway. Here is a good explanation of how it works: http://www.blackchapman.com/medical-legal-journal/personal-i... and then an explanation of how insidious it could be (eg taking into likelyhood to sue) http://www.millerandzois.com/colossus.html
I made the suggestion because the Autotools provide a standard way of doing things. If you can shoehorn your project into make distcheck, you're basically done. As you noted above, there were problems with the way he did things that I'm pretty sure would not be there in an Autotools build. Plus, it gives you something expandable instead of a base for more cruft. ./configure is always nice, and any make is about 'automated dependency tracking' so I'm a little unclear as to why that doesn't apply. I guess at this point it's not totally unfeasible to maintain the Makefile by hand.
For some reason on Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64 OSX 10.8.2 gave me a blank white page for like 10 seconds before the page loaded. Is everything pulled in via javascript or something?

Glad I waited though site looks beautiful.
Everyone uses Eclipse/SpringTool Suite(STS) for spring/grails application development or for projects using gradle as a build tool.

One of the main features of this release (version 12) is the upgrade of the Spring integration, so maybe IntelliJ will become useful to the Spring Java crowd.

Note that the community version of IntelliJ doesn't have this Spring support (nor the javascript IDE capabilities).
Inside a Jekyll repo on Github:

New file button = New Post (rich editor)
Branch and new file = Draft
Edit button (owner) = Edit
Edit button (reader) = Submit correction
Pull request = Submit Guest post
Pull request comment = Copy/content editor
Issues = Idea/Suggestion bucket
Commit button = Publish and deploy

If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css (maybe you could inline link it?), then you have a pretty complete blog engine for hackers. This would be an awesome feature IMO.

Github would then be the place where you put your code, write your blog, track your issues, paste snippets for IRC (Gist), display your business card (profile info), and host your talk slides (SpeakerDeck). The next logical step to me would be integrating conferences/user groups (ala Lanyard/Meetup.com).

PS. @github feel free to hire me to help build it out :P
This is a great new feature. Another thing this reminded me of is how good the github team is at releasing new features, clearly explaining them, and getting them integrated smoothly and across a wide user base. Its very impressive to me since this is rarely done well IMO.
Finally! I often want to share small scripts and having to create a repository locally first is much less convenient than just pasting the file online.
NUI: style your iOS app with style sheets
This is really wonderful. Great for those of us who work from tablets frequently.
This is awesome for drive-by commits of documentation and such. Marvelous.
Yeah, I have the HTTPS Everywhere Chrome extension, which (almost) always works but breaks here. Made it look like the status page was down.
Last Night at New York Tech Meetup: How Can We Get Our Hands on Your LittleBits?
This is a useful feature by a site a great part of the hn users use sometimes daily, the more points, more visibility. It's an indication of its usefulness.
Most currencies that are dealt with online are more stable than BTC. But no, not "immune".
Founder here - just wanted to clarify that bank username/password is not required, you can also use deposit verification. But glad to hear you're interested in accepting bitcoin. Thanks!
Gist is great for that too: https://gist.github.com/
How parasites manipulate hosts
Thanks for the feedback. I have a feeling we're pulling full-rez images to display before showing the page (I'm the designer, I can dev to speak a bit more about it). We are trying to figure out a smart way to resize images to lighten the load. Thanks for the feedback about the design! Sign up and play around.
The visual design and choice of typeface are both excellent.

Great job.
The robotic equivalent of a Swiss army knife
annoying?
But on the other hand, I don't have a gas station at my house... I could have a charging station though.
great stuff, Anil!
Nice to see Github releasing more consumer features lately (deleting branches on merge, now creating files, etc). After not seeing a significant update for months, I thought Github forgot about the consumers in their more focused efforts towards enterprise users.
Very very minor nitpick/addendum to your point. Some languages let you swap out the rand function for a secure implementation. In those cases its important to make sure that that mechanism is actually in place.

In Perl for example:

http://search.cpan.org/~mkanat/Math-Random-Secure-0.06/lib/M...
Facebook to front page in 2004: "16 points for being able to see who my friends are?"

Twitter to front page in 2005: "16 points for being able to write short messages?"

eBay to front page in 1998: "16 points for being able to sell things?"

It isn't about how involved or difficult a task is. Twitter wasn't "hard" to build (early on). It's about the utility of something, and this provides a great deal of utility. I don't mean my post to come off as a flame, as that's not at all what it's intended, but I, for one, find this very useful.
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine