skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know you're just spitballing here, but 30k page views is probably pretty low and a 2-5% conversion rate is definitely extremely high.
Brogue has a dynamic legend for monsters and items. I've never seen one done so well for terrain. This game does a nice job of combining all useful information I need in one tiny spot. Well done!

Aaaand... idea stolen! ;)
I'm guessing 2-5% conversion rate is a little high, but your point still stands.
I'd hazard a guess at A/B testing for new registrations?
I think you are trolling but I gave it a hard look anyway. My cable subscription helps fund several TV news operations and I buy the paper edition of the NY Times frequently.

That is not enough, and point taken. If you have any recommendations for a high quality subscription only journalism operation please tell me.

Where I have changed considerably though is with video entertainment.

In my younger days I used to use bittorrent, and megavideo et al... and rarely pay for movies/tv shows.

Jaron Lanier changed my mind about all of this. I now pay for a lot of movies/tv with my Netflix/Amazon Prime subscription and by renting/buying on iTunes and Amazon.

I even went so far as to create an app to facilitate this. My problem with not pirating movies is that the catalog of these online services are incomplete. You have to search a few, and sometimes a particular title is not available at all.

I built http://streamjoy.tv as an abstraction layer above Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. Search in one place, compare availability and price.

That is how I am putting my coding skills behind my economic philosophy.

When the machines do most of our jobs, my hope is we can still find meaningful, gainful employment in creative projects. In the current economic context the creators need a mechanism to be compensated.
https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...
Many years ago, there was a language called TOM. TOM was a descendant of Objective C, but with garbage collection, blocks, some other stuff ... and a Common Lisp style condition system (before Objective C had exceptions or blocks or GC or ...).

http://gerbil.org/tom/

Sadly dead once the author got his PhD though.
> So I simply uninstall it and use software that works.

Which is convenient, as then I feel less guilty about the issues I don't have time to triage, less alone fix. You don't think I personally care if you use KDE or not I hope... I contribute where I can, as time becomes available. If people find that useful, that's wonderful. If people don't find that useful, that's fine too.

I've heard from many people who have found useful those things I've found time to implement, so I'll keep plugging along for now.

As it turns out though, there actually is a build farm/continuous integration infrastructure that our wonderful sysadmins have setup for KDE by now: http://build.kde.org/

But CI isn't useful unless it results in actionable information, and it still requires developer action to make the fixes. We're accepting patches...
Why Two U.S. servicemen imprisoned for rape in Japan
It's better to slack off in the office.
Shuzan held out his short staff and said, "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"
The lesson I've learned from the various reserved instance reductions is to never buy 3-year terms.
My New Email System
Mine just adds one step before the first: Learn how to find customers.
You should also read up on the disputes they have had with Reddit about how they promoted their content; earned them an official site-wide ban, if I recall correctly..
About 9 months ago, I had a severe bout of food poisoning. I had gotten so dehydrated that I passed out briefly and was physically unable to pick myself up out of an awkward position between the toilet and the wall next to the toilet. I was unemployed at the time (but working, trying to get a software product off the ground on my own) and had no emergency medical insurance. My roommate (thank God I had one) took me to the ER where they gave me a mild anti-nausea drug and pumped me full of fluids.

The hospital only charged me about 40% of the full bill, due to my "hardship" of being unemployed. Still, it was $1200 for nothing a little weed and a gallon of Gatorade wouldn't do. Most of the bill was to have a doctor walk in the room, make a few jokes at me, and leave. If I knew I'd be paying for a standup routine, I would have preferred to go see Louis C.K. and saved $1100.

I still haven't bought health insurance, which is certainly a gamble, but so is buying health insurance. When you buy health insurance, you're betting against the insurance company that you're going to put less money into insurance premiums than you're going to get out as benefits. In the last 2 and a half years of not having health insurance, that one ER trip is the only medical need I've had. In the end, $1200 was a lot less than I would have paid in premiums. So far, I'm winning my gamble.
For all the "embarrassment" that Itanium is, here's a fun fact that astonished me:

The world market for Itanium is bigger than the whole market for AMD.
Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency, not a payment scheme. You can use it like cash with no (or minimal) fees, or you can layer schemes with various properties on top of it.
Moving beyond the classroom
I've always heard, from talking with my fellow programmers, looking at posts on HN, and viewing blogs, that programmers must learn outside of the classroom. And I have always wanted to do so.

I have taken 4 years of programming academic classes in my academic career, 2 in high school and 2 in college. I currently attend DeVry University. While all of the classes were very helpful in learning techniques and basics, I feel they have not fully prepared me for becoming a programmer. I do have a thorough understanding of OOP, or atleast what they have taught in class which ranges to Polymorphism, inheritance, and interfaces. My primary language is Java but I have begun learning C++ and have 3 years experience in SQL.

I took up a job at a local hospital to work in their IT department. There I was able to sharpen my SQL skills. From there I took up my current a job at a government contractor. Here I am working on my Java and C++ programming and starting to learn Socket programming with Java.

My issue however, is in trying to learn something to better myself. I have attempted to learn web development, since I figured that would be the next best move. However, the path to moving pass basic HTML and CSS seems to elude me. I have always had a problem with self teaching and most of the programmers I am around either seem on-par with me or are too busy to mentor me. Thus I need another avenue in which I can better myself.

I have attempted to look into open source projects, but they all seem more complex than anything I have worked on. I attempt to just learn a piece of the project, but each time I try, the piece seems to expand in an area I don't understand and I begin to feel overwhelmed.

So I am posting here to ask advice from anyone who may know the best avenue for me to take in furthering my abilities as a programmer. I see myself as a competent learner as long as I have the resources to learn from.
So, an interesting attempt at making a nice transparent marketplace that I know of is SnapHealth ( https://www.snaphealth.com/ ).

These folks are working to provide an easy directory where you can look up all the doctors in your area and get their pricing for services on a cash basis.

It's interesting watching as the industry goes through these undulations trying to sort itself out.

(Disclaimer: I know the folks working on it, so if you have any comments/questions/concerns I'd love to pass them on.)
Queries that will make you smile FatFractal’s queries are very cool
I'd try shopping around for a GP first, versus a hospital. Find out if they offer cash discounts and which testing centers they use. Then see if the testing center they use offer a discount.

If your primary care doctor is cool, he should be able to tell you the estimate and cash discount during the consultation.
Telecommuting and cloud computing: For innovators only
I despise Unity. I'm only using it right this minute because our company standard desktop at the $DAYJOB is Ubuntu.

Personally I find the state of desktop Linux to be fairly close to abysmal at the moment. I'm not sure we're any better off now than we were with Gnome circa 2000 or so.

I had, and still have, high hopes for KDE once Qt went LGPL, and I do run KDE on my personal laptop. It's not bad, but there are some major pieces of software that don't have Qt native versions. sigh
There's very little demand for high quality journalism.

A high quality article might cost 100 times as much to create as a low-quality one, but the returns from it (ads, subscriptions, whatever) aren't anywhere near 100x as much. At this point, all magazines, newspapers and similar outlets have figured this out.

There may be some sort of niche possible in ebooks aimed at relatively narrow niches - niches that aren't served by general interest publications. But for regular old publishing/"journamalism"/opinion pieces.... the outlook for making a living at those is not good.
I used to write for a tiny outfit that scraped together a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and paid me ~$50 for 1000 word articles.

They were approached almost daily being offered low $xxx figures to publish articles with backlinks for SEO purposes (which they refused). And this was a site with a few hundred pages of content and less than 100k uniques a month.

On that kind of scale, a backlink from the Atlantic would presumably be worth thousands of dollars.
Producers of low quality articles on demand have been called hacks for a bit over 200 years, and some of them write the news.

Hacker News seems appropriate :)
Announcing: Distill 2013
I literally sold dozen of games in diskettes back in the '90. I cannot say how much money I've made, but certainly, a lot to buy a 50cc. motorcycle and a pro BMX. Ah… those days! And also, I re-traded lot of shareware. I bought them from the magazines and sold the copies for the same price…
Mir is likely to be influenced by Canonical's experience using Surface Flinger as a compositor for Ubuntu Touch.
Qt for iOS (preview)
You seem to be confused. I was explaining why you don't see many bug reports, not threatening you with my not using KDE. I haven't tried KDE in like 12 years, it was just a general statement, not a comment on KDE specifically.
Introducing the Open Source RabbitMQ Simulator
TSA Will Permit Knives, Golf Clubs on U.S. Planes
Amazon Steps Toward Building A Mobile Ad Network. API In Beta
I'm curious, would you describe your project a little?
> $100

That's the reblog rate.
Physicians in private practice can pay half of their gross billing in insurance collection costs, including denied claims (which patients are nominally responsible for, but often don't/can't pay) and hiring experts to deal with the deliberately complex and ever-changing paperwork that insurance companies use to induce excuses to deny claims. That's before all other costs, including staff with an actual non-bureaucratic purpose, office space, malpractice insurance, etc.
Superfluous question, perhaps.

What licence are you releasing it on? I read Zed Shaw's essays (rants?) on GPL a while ago. Given that your tool occupies the Server space (as did his) I recommend a read^H^H^H^H butchers (keeping with the spirit of things) ;-)

http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html
Do you know what technology they're using? How long do they make you wait for confirmation, etc.
I just tested (logged out, logged back in) and did not get the real name prompt after selecting to keep my username back when the change was first announced. That seems to confirm it's not something everyone encounters.
What state of any substantial size is run better than the federal government, when you take out federal subsidies or massive oil/gas revenues (Saudi Arabia doesn't have a budget deficit---that doesn't mean it's well run).
In Computers We Trust — As math grows ever more complex, will computers reign?
This whole situation could get solved with two swift changes in the law:

- Employer provided healthcare is now illegal (with exceptions for the military).

- Healthcare discounts are now illegal. Insurance and cash-in-hand individuals pay exactly the same rate.

These changes would be quite painful in the short term. In fact there would be a queue of people arguing why this was a horrible idea (the "I got mine" group).

However in the long term this makes health insurance more similar to auto-insurance (car insurance).

People can actually shop around, insurers have to compete for individual's business, and if people want to forgo insurance or go with a smaller insurer (new business!) then they can.

Plus insurers and individuals will now both work together to bring hospital care costs down (they're on the same "side").

But people are too short sighted to see what a massive leap forward this would be. It is the very definition of a healthy capitalist market. But their thinking about insurance and how it "should" work is just so muddied with what has been done up until now.

Employer insurance in particular is a massive problem - due to the lock-in (both between employees and their employer's insurance company AND between the employee and employer). It really hurts innovation, startups, and growth in America today.

Healthcare discounts hurt people without insurance AND make the insurance sector uncompetitive. It is impossible to start a new insurance scheme now because you cannot get big enough discounts to be competitive.
Yes, they got one thing wrong though it's already been corrected in Canonical's design document.

But it seems to me that the main problem Canonical had with Wayland was that they wanted to run their stack on devices that only had Android device drivers. As far as I can tell Wayland relies on things like KMS to function, and at the very least Firefox OS has no plans to use Wayland because they don't think they can get it to use the Android drivers they're planning on using.
I have a high-deductible insurance policy so I just pay up front for medical services (out of an HSA, but it's no different to the doc). Despite paying before the visit I got a bill after an appointment and then another warning that it was late. I called today after researching the CPT code and current billing schedule from my area to confirm that what they wanted was BS and as soon as she looked at my account she said "oh, yea they forgot to add the write off".

Medical billing is so screwed up. I walk in and pay up front and it still somehow counts as a write off. A write off for what I am not sure, I am supposedly paying list price. I assume they really jack up the prices, have a pool for "uninsured" (regardless of merit) and then mark down from there to get a nice tax benefit because they gave a lot of "charity" care. I'd consider the $135 I paid for a < 10 minute visit to be more than ample compensation, whatever they're getting for the $90 write off should be fraud.
Au contraire, it is precisely because of this -> Perl is not a "hot technology" these days <- that we need to emphasise the Perl aspect of this tool, to bring back some coolness ;-)

You go, Steve!
Great read @churpi! I totally agree with you. Having doubts are wonderful. Although its not the best feeling in the world, it really pushes the innovator to analyze their product and find all of its potential weak points/flaws as well as its strengths. The test of a great innovator is to be able to view their product objectively and improve their work. Embrace your doubts - They will make you a better innovator!
I think the crime is that the costs are so arbitrary. When hospitals can charge 10 times as much for the same procedure depending on how you are going to pay, someone is getting screwed. Even if your insurance covers it, you're paying that insurance, and the reason the cost for your insurance remains so high is because the insurance company has negotiated to pay $2500 for a $250 procedure.

I mean, when the insurance company negotiates to pay higher prices, they are lying to overstate their benefit and justify higher prices. Hospitals are complicit in this scheme. But hospitals make more from higher margins, and insurance companies can justify greater prices.

It's a broken system when both buyer and seller want to negotiate the highest price they can in secret, away from the person who is funding the buyer.
There are some types of errors that just /deserve/ to be in meme form.
Why would that be surprising? It's a pretty normal thing for companies to do.
Fake It. Trash It. Build It.
For your type of service, I would initially limit the locations available to your users (and build your base from these users) and have a signup form for other locations (and open them up as soon as you have enough ‘seed users’).

How are you going to build up from a base of users?

Get all your friends & family to use the service & leverage existing platforms.
Heard a 3D printer enthusiast's description of his children making their own doll furniture, RPG miniatures, etc.

Toys.

Barbie? Probably not.
Given that the article was a response to criticism of a previous proposal of mine on grounds that it used exceptions for control flow, and given that I linked to that discussion (on the page for the proposal in question) in the opening paragraphs of this one I probably felt that the reasons for using exceptions for control had been adequately covered at that point.

But I was probably not trying to suggest you should regularly do this (certainly I wouldn't suggest that now), only that if you find you have a good reason to do it you shouldn't be afraid of it.
The first photo in the article suggests otherwise.
Librarian Of Congress To White House Over Phone Unlocking: Just Doing Our Job
There's 36 signals now... one hire away from living up to the company name :)
The RMB was 'depegged' as a press release but is only allowed to float in a narrow range of 0.3%. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float). Most of the increase in value from 2005 was a command decision from the CCP, not a result of market float.

At any rate, 15% over 5 years is less than 3% inflation. That's low inflation.

I don't think borrowing rates will stay this cheap over the next 2 decades because eventually the private sector will catch up to all the public jobs we've been shedding under socialist obama and GDP growth will resume, creating inflationary pressure again. But for now, and while we're either losing or barely holding even on employment over the next year or so, the interest rates will stay low. The second they touch 3% or 5% (normal inflation range), the fed can start jacking up their interest rate to compensate.

In short: It's ok, our currency is not going to collapse.
This is in some sense a good counterpoint to the recent comparisons of WebKit monoculture to Linux monoculture: everyone working together on Linux is nice, but it has downsides, too, because things do become unduly Linux-specific to the detriment of competition.
The main Vatican website is much nicer than this; the only thing this has in common with the rest of the Vatican website is the background.
Hmmm. Only an "idiot" would talk about sales?

Patio11 - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o...

Nathan Barry - http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/

Brennan Dunn - http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consulta...
I agree with ginko, is there some supporting evidence you have that points to support from NVIDIA?

If so, that's a pretty interesting development.

---

EDIT: Thanks for the update ElliotH!
I came across this article out of frustration. My wife went to a clinic that posted an office visit rate of $99. She presented our insurance card just so the outlay would get logged in the system against our out-of-pocket total, but there was no expectation of actually getting any money back. We have a very high deductible (by choice), and we'll see insurance money only in a really bad year, not unlike auto or house insurance. But since she showed them that card, suddenly the amount we owed shot up to $273. Both the clinic's and insurance company's response to us has been basically: suck it up, we have contracts in place.
I don't think arthurrr called you an idealist. Naive, maybe.
YouTube to launch music streaming service, take on Spotify
What about all the people without car insurance even under this program? This would be even worse in your situation.
Goes very nicely with the fragrance of dark coffee [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnrl0tmd3k
I sense that, for a long time, the world of journalism has told itself that it is a fundamental pillar of democratic society. While true, the implication is that society owes it something. You might even extrapolate that a journalist doing an investigation that did not result in a published story, has still added value because they have kept the authorities in check.

However, the funding for this type of work only really existed as a quirk of the technology that newspapers used and now that the public has the opportunity to only pay for the stories they're interested in; I think society will need more constitutional rights regarding access to government data and a crowd-sourced monitoring effort to prevent corruption.

I, like you, don't feel a moral imperative to pay someone for putting in a days work regardless of what they produce at the end of it. I would donate to political campaigns regarding constitutional rights to open data though.
If this worries you: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-comp...
No it doesn't. If I work for a company that does not provide health benefits any health insurance I buy is NOT deductible. and that is one of the many odd decisions made.

If you are self-employed (which is what the linked page is about) you are both the employer and employee and you as the employer of yourself get the decuction. People working for "the man" don't get this luxury.
that's true, but I think (could be wrong) that Axelrod presented his results as "definitive" given that no-one had simulated a comparable timescale before. it was certainly presented as such in the textbook I was reading from.
Photopoll and Hubba look like great startups, very cool! Thanks for getting us in at #15.
The statement which I called drivel was: "The Founding Fathers were deeply paranoid of an overbearing government and an very powerful political class." The Founders were not a homogenous group of people, and the dominant faction, the Federalists, looked quite admiringly at the British Parliament.

> Federalism was a core part of the "experiment"

I didn't say Federalism wasn't a part of the experiment of the Founding. I'm addressing your historical revisionism about why the Federal system exists. It has more to do with political expediency in a climate where the states held all the cards than any deeply held belief that the Federal government should be as strong as possible.

Remember, the Framers didn't have a mandate to create a new Constitution, because the state legislatures were worried what that would do to their power. They created the Constitution they thought they could get away with.
Google recently changed YouTube so you get the prompt multiple times a day asking you to opt into having your real name displayed on your account. I've heard from probably a dozen people with the same issue.

Furthermore, they removed the 'No'/'Cancel' options from the modal dialog; the only way to dismiss it is to go all the way through it and try and figure out which of the confusingly worded options is the one to make it go away.