skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't know where to start. But here goes anyway:

1. I wrote a billing system for an M.D.'s personal practice especially geared to collect the $1.6 million in outstanding receivables. She killed the project because "those office people are too stupid to use it anyway." It was more important to her to maintain her "superiority" than collect her bills.

2. An HMO whose legacy system I maintained decided to convert to something "more modern than green screens with color and a mouse". (The legacy system worked perfectly.) The new system never worked. Two years, 3 consulting firms and $20 million later, I was brought back in to "convert it back". By then, they had lost 60% of their revenue and were out of business a year later.

3. I doctor's health organization was acquiring about one clinic per month. Their Big 5 Firm brought me in to develop a plan to convert each clinic's software and data into the main system. It was taking 18 months to do each conversion. They were 29 conversions behind. I made recommendations that required drastic changes in their IT department. They were so upset, they refused the engagement. (Out of business 18 months later.)

4. Another HMO spent 18 months and $5 million implement HIPPA to maintain privacy. The running joke was that the files for the worst cases were kept in the break room for all to see for a laugh on their break.

5. The claims processing software in another HMO I worked at was configured to NEVER APPROVE A CLAIM ON ITS FIRST PASS. I don't know what happened to them, but prison would be too good.

6. At a PPO I worked at, I had to cover production errors between Christmas and New Years because the 2 primary programmers were on vacation. (I only had access to the test system.) I prodded my supervisor to get me a production login and password for 4 weeks. The first error (7:30 on Monday morning) and I couldn't get in. We argued in front of the call center (400 people) about my lack of access. "You DO have a password and here it is," he cried. "Yea, but I don't have a login." "What's a login?" That pretty much sums up the talent level in healthcare IMO.

Just part of the reason healthcare is so expensive, but the providers earn less.

I'll chew razor blades before I ever consider "healthcare" work again.
I liked this quote:

When you're 22 ... You're "consciously incompetent."
... [But at 42,] You're at incredible risk of thinking you know things when ... You don't know, but you don't know you don't know.
Wired Editor Chris Anderson Blocks Email from PR Firms
They are ranked 500 or so of all websites.

I presented Sleep.FM - The Social Alarm Clock at TechCrunch40 where a VC spoke of this, as http://www.sleep.fm is a virtual world social network too. I thought Sleep.FM was the first virtual world like social network. Interesting to learn otherwise. Also, another investor informed me of Hive7.

Well at least Sleep.FM is the first Social Alarm Clock :) .
So far haven't been told otherwise!
my first thought: woah, where do i get a .io?
To be honest, it shouldn't confuse a guy with a degree in Software.
GigaOm vs TechCrunch: Are GigaOm readers any different from TechCrunch?
from a compete blog
that's better. Beer is good. Depending on how many people are showing (if it is less than 15-ish), why not?

BTW, I live in SF, but I will be in Boston that weekend, so I might just come and chat some.
I'm not old enough to understand everything
This is the book I'm currently reading to learn more about Cocoa.

Note that with the release of Leopard, Xcode 3.0 and the new Interface Builder, a lot of the things in this book (such as the diagrams and directions) are no longer relevant and might be hard to follow.

The third edition of the book (which covers all the new things) will be out in the spring, according to the author.
I've noticed 2 kinds of people on this forum. Those who want to learn and share and those who want to show everyone how much they know. I've also noticed there are "younger" and "older" members. I suspect that there is very little correlation between age and "know-it-allness". In fact, there is probably a "johari window" to be found here, the 4 types:

- Younger/Share & Learn: Go Getters

- Younger/Know-It-All: Naive & Insecure

- Older/Share & Learn: Experienced

- Older/Know-It-All: Out to Pasture
But you can be crazy and still have valid results...
Hey, I am one of those. And, while it is not slavery, it is real indentured servitude.

If I want to stay in this country, I am forced to work all the time. If I am without a job for over 60 days, I am considered an illegal alien, and get in hot waters.

So, I can't just quit and say "want to travel asia and europe for 60 days", and then get a new job.

Or Just quit for few months, and work on something on my own.

etc.. etc..

I have 6 years of time-frame to get that Green Card. End the process of getting it is LOONG. I can't switch employers, or get a real promotion without having it to reset the process all over again.

In the meanwhile, the employer knows this, and uses in it's own advantage.

Sure, I can quit, and
1. go home, (forget about comming back to this country).
2. Switch employers (and restart the green card process again).

Still, options that are not good for me right now, so I have to put up with the "Indentured servitude" until I get my freedom (which is the green card).

This thing actually started in the early 19th century, where mexican labour would be brought from mexico to work on US lands, but they had to pay all the expenses of the travel/documents themselves. So, they had to work until they paid everything, which took years (with their very low wages).
Hence they were said to be in "indentured servitude", not quite slaves, but basically between a rock and a hard place.

All my friends that got green cards, felt like they got freedom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant
I don't have personal knowledge of most of what he talks about in his book, but in the case of Guatemala he's spot-on. The CIA removed their first democratically elected leader, Arbenz, in 1954 and the country has never really recovered. I don't think Perkins is far off. I've worked in Guatemala and China extensively, and in government in Canada, and none of what he's written here sounds far-fetched to me.
[SouthBay] Buxfer: looking for smart hackers to join the gang
I am definitely both a Go Getter and Naive & Insecure.
[shrug] I keep a list of things to do in version control. I think the real attraction of "productivity software" is that it's easy to make with a potentially large user base.
Fonts for hackers
Are you a biologist? There are respected biologists today who do see "dramatic advancement". It must be discouraging to them to have their work dismissed by people who aren't even familiar with it.
Ask YC: How do you authenticate users?
I've seen various sites use OpenID, Google, MS Passport, Yahoo, Facebook, and/or other third-party systems to authenticate users. Anyone here using one of those?
Aaron Swartz.. truly the most brilliant human to come to the tech world. He is a revolutionary.
I'm on H1B too.

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. - Eleanor Roosevelt.

I've no problems with any of the rules that come along because it was my choice to work in the US on H1B.

A correction:
"I have 6 years of time-frame to get that Green Card."
-- You have more than 6 years. In the given validity of H1B visa, you just have to get your I-140 filed, after which you can file for yearly increment of your H1B visa.
I always thought cgiproxy sites were slower?
I am new to Wolfram's work, so I am at a disadvantage, but I find the idea interesting.

Seems unlikely that the "viral potential" for a given random web app could be gleaned by perusing the code or that there will soon be technology available to simulate a user. And if you were to reduce the randomness by somehow requiring the code or the app to conform to some standard in order to make it easier to automate the perusal, well we already have a whole SEO industry dedicated to gaming the current automated search technology, don't we?

At some point don't you think it is likely that the social networking application model will be co-opted by market testing enterprises who will design ways to entice lots of people to test software applications while having their physiological reactions captured online. With a record of human reactions directly correlated to a specific application, predictive results from automated searching would then be feasible.
Google OpenSocial: Common APIs For Building Social Apps
Yes. Also, those farmers had a "choice" not to come in the US, yet they ended up in those conditions..

If you think you are free, Just quit your job for few weeks (over 60 days), and see what happens.
Illegal. Stay without a job over 6 months, and you can't get in the US for 10 years. Try to work another job, (that is not related to your profession), and it is considered illegal employment. It can be Automatic deportation.
Even if you want to part-time DJ (for fun), can be considered automatic deportation.

Also, a lot of very early stage startups don't want to deal (or don't have time and money) with such immigration hassles.

Sorry, this is not complete freedom. I am treated relatively well by my company, and make good money, but I'd also like to have the option to just quit, and work something out of my own, and see where it goes. I can't right now, and neither can you, unless you want to go back to your country, and say this country good bye for good.
Google to launch an open and common API for various social networks
I liked the brilliant article.
I like anti-aliased Monaco 14 pt (I know, it's large, but I'm trying to save my eyes) on Terminal.app for the Mac.
API round up. Who is next? Please re-think this mess.
Yep. Me again. So 2 more startups have their own API. Seriously. I got only one question where is the unification? If everyone has an API and every service is building on top of others, aren't we going to end up with a big pile of junk? Someone oughta find a way to make all this APIs talk seamlessly to each other or as I suggested "Build an API for user data" and let other service plug into us.
i use 10pt monaco on windows with ClearType turned on
I prefer Terminus or DejaVu Sans Mono.
That's true, but highly misleading. The OpenDocument Foundation is neither a major proponent of ODF, nor are they a substantial force in anything.

They are a very small startup with a good name.
It's highly likely that they were easy to sway by a concerted effort by MS.

This was a very clever PR move to create confusion in the marketplace.
Google: A Druckerian Ideal?
Hmm, 1.2 billion page views a month, and only making $30 mil a year?

I don't think I'll go into the ad business...
Django authentication middleware. It's really, really easy -- like everything in Django.
I think Ebay should stop trying to be 'cute' and just get on with making buying and selling easier and more powerful.

For instance, they keep reducing the number of weeks Finished auctions are shown, and you have to login, then auctions expire even though hosting them is cheap, blah blah.

Then half the stuff is junk.

The only chaos theory I see is the non-fancy kind. It's just chaotic.
The one unifying platform is the web. And it will continue to be.
I think I'll make a Web 2.0 startup that thinks up names for new Web 2.0 startups.

What shall I call it? Startnom? CeaseGuerre?
What decisions made you scratch your head?
I like the look of Proggy, but it's bitmapped at 10px. My screen is 15.4"/1680x1050. I have pretty good vision, but looking at fonts that small all day will make my eyes bleed.
There is more in the video game industry than retail. I'm a game entrepreneur and there are lots of things to be done other than retail, that get you in a better situation than it.
Earthquake Strikes Silicon Valley! (5.6 magnitude)
I don't suppose they use tesseract, though? I tried it recently, and it didn't recognize anything. Admittedly my test was not very thorough.
What's the difference between smart money and dumb money?
Summary: Smart money is money plus the promise of help that's worth paying for, dumb money is money plus hidden harm, and mostly money is mostly money. Weed out the dumb money with diligence. Evaluate supposedly smart money with the smart money test. Finally, assume your investors are mostly money: unbundle money and value-add to get money on the best terms possible and value-add on the best terms possible.
Ask YC: Provide Health Insurance at Start-Up?
All, I'm wondering if folks have been costing health insurance when seeking capital. Do start-ups leave the health insurance to the individual employees to figure out themselves?

Thanks,
NoMoreSnow
Here's what went through my head, in order:

1) Update twitter ("earthquake!")

2) Make post to News.YC

3) Stand in door frame
profonts are quite nice as well.
http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/
We use Django as well. Plus, authentication is sort of inherent in our startup by its very nature, so even that isn't needed. I couldn't really say more than that, but if I explained it, you'd understand.
Very cool. Just one more reason why Facebook is doomed.
Monotype fonts are tough to get right. The Latin alphabet evolved "off the grid", as did all of its prominent variations -- for example black letter (sometimes called "gothic"), humanist (the fore-runner of our "roman type"), and chancery cursive (the fore-runner of our "italic"). The only precursor for monotype is the large, decorated capitals at the beginning of chapters and sections -- "illuminated letters" -- that were approximately square.

Some consequence: the poor spacing of the letters 'i' and 'l', and the squashed, dark appearance of the 'm' and 'w' in monotype fonts. There is something of a hopeless in the task, though, since any good monotype font will have hundreds of characters in it: punctuation, numbers, European letters, mathematical marks...

Making them all look right together, with the additional constraint of identical size, is a Herculean task.
Consumating's ill-fated points system: aligning desired behaviors with point rewards is difficult
There are casual games -- but you're not going to be working on the cool 3D stuff unless you bow to the giant studios and work 80 hours a week.
It was rather disappointing but I'm sure it will grow in time. It just seemed like yet another wiki for Aaron but I was surprised too at the "several months" comment.
My YC Startup Enters Private Beta
What do you think? We're still twiddling with the design, so any notes there would be greatly appreciated.
how about the cambridge innovation center in kendall square? we can host.
So are people meeting at the bar or at Lobby 7? And for those of us who don't know the area, where are these places?
We're still twiddling with the design, so any notes there would be appreciated.
5.6 Mag Earthquake knocks San Jose
Yeah, Monaco 12 in Textmate is pretty darn comfortable. I wish I could turn on AA in Terminal.app...
Design looks great to me! You've nailed the sports theme! Signed up for beta.

PS: Another cool Rails startup!
That was the biggest one I've been here for so far.
long ago when i started programming i used OCR. it's a terrible font, designed to be easy for machines to read, "Optical Character Recognition." but at the time i didn't know that, and didn't care. i was young and wild

a few months ago i tried setting Vim to use OCR, but for whatever reason it didn't wanna. luckily in my quest i found a free package of fonts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#The_font... these are professional fonts that you'd normally have to pay $20 a pop for, but for legal reasons they're free in their packaged form

one of the fonts is Andale Mono, which Vim didn't reject. it felt odd at first compared to Courier, mainly because Courier is quite heavy. but Andale grew on me quick and it remains my font. since then there have been times i've thought my code actually looked aesthetically beautiful
I like the design a lot. I find the fixed scrolling thing on the left disorienting. You've got a lot of extra room in the bar at the top; can you make the login box, the register link, and/pr the navbar links bigger?
I don't see why anyone would use most of those unless they needed to authenticate users with a third party in order to use their API. Using OpenID as the primary way of authenticating users unnecessarily complicates the UI. Offering it as an option, especially the dynamic way Intense Debate does it, can work well. Using one of the other authentication systems when you're not trying to get data from that third party will just confuse the user. Why is this random website trying to sign me into Yahoo?
So weird. Friend and I were jogging down at the marina and didn't feel it one bit.

I'm so disappointed.
I like your priorities :-)

Seriously though, I hope no one was hurt.
Mercury News on Silicon Valley quake
Opera and Google Earth are good examples of such apps - they suck. Both have non native and ugly user interface. So if you your app does more or less what other apps do, but looks like this, people will prefer the native cocoa apps.
I'll send you an invite.
I really like the design and the concept is quite clever. I think there's a definite niche here. However, I too am annoyed by the scrolling feedback bar, and my browser won't let me close it once it's opened.
i like the design a lot.

can you make the 'FEEDBACK' link look clickable? (hand cursor)
Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook
Asynchronous Games the Future of Casual Gaming
Async == web app
IMO, nothing beats Lucida Console 10pts.
You were jogging. That's why you didn't feel it. If you were sitting still looking a computer screen, then you probably would have.
I love how you incorporated online poker design idioms into your interface. Did you talk about that in your initial pitch to YC or is that something you decided on later?
Yes, we did. We're definitely incorporating a lot of what made online poker so successful.
You can't hit cancel and close it? What browser/OS do you use?
I'm in San Jose and WOW very nerve wracking. I'm getting too old for this.
Felt it all the way in my office ~ 80 miles away. Amazing. Never felt anything this powerful before.
Windows XP & Firefox 2. The Cancel button jumps in and out of view, but doesn't stay available long enough to click it. It works fine for me in IE though.
Wow, that's unusual. Going to have to check into that. Thanks.
Just plain-old username and password. Before launch I'll experiment with running everything over SSL, but it might turn out to be too much overhead for a bunch of tiny AJAX requests. If so, then I'll keep the session in cleartext but do secure login by implementing DH key exchange in JS.
Actually it turns out it only occurs when I change my browser size away from maximized. It never allows me to scroll down far enough to see the buttons...
Felt it in oakland, but I figured it was a 3.0 or so...
Wow, he must jog with precision then to have the motion of his legs perfectly counterbalance the motion of the earth, let alone the motion of his surroundings produced by a 5.6 quake!

Any tips on anti-quake jogging?

ps: I hope everyone is ok up there.
Like most have said, the design seems very appropriate for this type of site. Signed up for beta as well. I'm curious to see what's inside.
i was listening to loud music and felt vibrations on the floor. at first, i thought some dude was going around with a very very loud bass! however, i soon realized everything else was shaking as well and ran downstairs scared shit!
That was awesome! Seriously, it was absolutely the coolest thing. Not really as intense as I would have expected a 5.6 quake to be, though. Still, my business partner and I were impressed and excited.

Sorry for the breathless report, folks, but it was my first and I have been unluckily missing earthquakes for years: Seattle's quake of 2001, a spate of microquakes in Spokane later... so I am thrilled to finally get one.

We're in San Jose BTW.
Another vote for monaco on Carbon Emacs (OS X). White text on black background, obviously :)
Add an aspect for meeting people + free iPod to the top player at the end of each month, and you've got a successful startup, no?
We were at the preview screening of "Lions for Lambs" at Stanford. The audience definitely felt it and some of them got up to leave. For a while, I thought it was a really impressive subwoofer :)
(In SF) That was one of the longest I've felt - though is was low intensity here but definitely unsettling. It was really a different kind of quake then I've felt in the past.
Jogging on a treadmill at the Presidio YMCA -- didn't feel a thing either.

As great as the bay is for people & companies, quakes make it not the best place to have your servers. When the big one hits, you don't want both your people and your systems out of commission for a few days.
Love the new silhouette front page. I can smell the Ohio loam.

I can only register for a Freeroll within 60 minutes of start time?
I used to want to be in the video game industry but I found the long and sometimes unpredictable hours a major drawback. It sounds like even he gets a little tired working the job - "It can be a lonely career."
Cool idea - I was definitely looking for this two months back. I'm excited to see the type of stuff that you guys are adding to fantasy sports.

Maybe you could add some cool, weekly pickems, at least for football. I don't know anyone that plays basketball or hockey. I'd imagine football is way ahead for fantasy sports, and I don't think people will start fantasy football now.
Keep in mind tonight's quake was 20-30x smaller than the one in 89.

Now THAT was an earthquake ;)
Yes. Otherwise it would fill up 4 days in advance and nobody would actually play.
i was running up some stairs at a park during the 89 quake. didn't feel a thing. it's really quite easy, just a matter of timing.
The site is based on short season leagues. So playing fantasy football right now is actually exactly what people will be doing :D
It's a bit early to say that, I think, but this sounds like an interesting development, for sure.

I'm a little confused, though - from what I can tell, these are API's that access information from social networks, iGoogle, etc. That's pretty cool, now people can make applications for the users of those networks.

Still... those saying this competes with Facebook don't really get what the point of Facebook is, at least for college kids.
I don't mind the feedback button scrolling, after all it's a beta site and it makes good sense to have the Feedback button jump out at people otherwise they'll never do it.
Usually if you are driving you mistake an earthquake with the car normal vibrations. I suppose the same happens when jogging.
"register in seconds" and the huge "play free now" button did a really good job of funneling me to the register page that I couldn't use because I don't have an invite code. I realized that I needed to request an invitation only after I had filled out 2/3rds of the registration form.
Yeah, '89 was something else. OTOH, it was centered off in the boonies (modulo Los Gatos), whereas this one looks to have been right outside of S.J., so a good ride even at less energy.

I'll still take quakes over tornadoes and hurricanes. They're usually harmless fun. Once in a while they're tremendously devastating, but what is life without adventure?
"Indeed, that strategy would fit into a model that Google has begun talking about recently. Vic Gundotra, who heads Google's developer programs, said last week that Google would soon begin an aggressive project to create software tools and give them away free in an open-source format.

The goal, he said, is to improve not just Google's applications, but any software that runs on the Web. That, in turn, would drive more Internet use, and Google would benefit indirectly by selling advertising, he said."

Wow, this sounds like a great plan! :)
This is a nice web page for starting up with cocoa:
http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting-started...