skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the UK, with regulations, I can spend about $50 get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited wi-fi access in 130,000 locations in the UK and in several thousand in 23 other countries, which incidentally includes many in Canada. You also get 5GB of online storage, and 'up to' 8mbps (I believe we were getting 6mpbs).

In Canada I can spend $80 on Bell's best package, get 100GB bandwidth, free unlimited wi-fi access at 650 starbucks, which you can get 2 hours free anyway! You also get 5MB (not GB) online storage (yet they give you 10GB of email storage to keep you off of hotmail or gmail). The only, supposed, advantage with this package is 16mbps, which I contest as fucking useless with such a low bandwidth cap, and I know for a fact (told by one of Bell's very own technicians this nice little fact) that our connection cannot get more than 1mbps (he said in a few months we might get 1.5mbps because they were upgrading the lines) and they're trying to fucking sell me 16mbps like I can actually use it!

The thing I want most is for service providers to choose how much my service providers can charge me, because I can pay $80 for shit I cannot even use! When we canceled our service with Bell they happily kept trying to charge us for wirecare (this is some moronic charge for faults in their lines, which in the UK they have to service for free cause it's their property) because we hadn't specifically canceled it. They wanted to charge $20 service termination for the wirecare, this despite it being free to cancel at any time if you're their customer... which brings their crazy logic into play. I'm not their customer when they're charging me $10 a month?!

When the Better Business Bureau got involved, all the magical charges they'd created for us (including new accounts that never existed, and thus legally cannot exist as they were never signed into existence, this included an entire change of name to someone who hadn't even created an account with bell!) amounting up to $80 a month magically disappeared.

People have no choice but to go with Bell in certain areas, and their business practices are fraudulent and the Better Business Bureau gives them an F because they avoid resolving the complaints.
So are you going to delete this one perhaps?
Thanks for the suggestions! Is Google Tasks the Labs feature in Gmail?
First thought: your aunt is trolling you.

Second (and more serious) thought: This speaks to the fear our elders have with computers. Many of us used this to help ourselves through college as technical repair, and Best Buy has done a good job as well. This, however, reminds me that we should be thinking about startups that solve this pain. It's the 50-year old equivalent to "will this help me get laid?" What will give that target demographic peace of mind about their computer use?
All those are important, and any honest person will say that most of those things matter to a large extent. Who wants to work with great technology, compensation and responsibility, but with a lousy team and environment?

What you really want to do is to get people to order them, rather than just vote on them.
Company name recognition.
Environment/Atmosphere and Team go hand in hand.
Unbelievably beautiful essay. Midway through my heart sank in despair, then I was awakened by a logical argument.

Well worth reading.
That argument would mean that non-reproducing people, particularly homosexuality (if you believe the "genetics" argument), would have been eliminated by now.
And so if you could just plug your TV into the sun, the wind, or a compost heap, all our problems would be solved.
I answered this over on SO, but here's a copypasta:

Really, this is a complicated question. I've worked for start ups, small development companies, and now one of the largest companies in the world. That said, here's my list:

1. Location: Being close to home-base helps. Offering positions in California is great, but I need to know why I should make that move. I went through at least three interviews with companies out on the west coast and not one gave me hard numbers on cost of living. Make it appealing, offer assistance and above all don't try to down play the significance of a move.

2. Obvious company vision for advancement both in product, position AND knowledge: Knowing that your work will be stagnant leads to mundane work days and eventually, I'd quit. Things have to be kept engaging, interesting and pervasive. I'm all for writing in archaic languages, as long as the goal is to move forward. The day I stop learning from my job is the day I quit. I tell everyone I interview that, and so far its worked well as a filtering comment.

3. Work environment & options: Where I am now, we have an interesting environment where we rarely see our coworkers as most of the telecommute, use flex time, or just aren't in our building. That's great, but we still to be engaged. My manager does a great job of keeping in touch to check in on my needs, and desires. Yep, they call us and ask us how we're doing. Management is a LARGE consideration in my choice of jobs. I've worked in too many small companies where management didn't have time to really, well, manage.

4. Perks: Yes, everyone likes perks. Insurance, and I mean all of it (medical, dental, vision) is crucial. No benefits? Just hang up now. No 401k or retirement plan? Get one, quickly. Discounts? Now that's just icing on the cake. Not required, but always good to see. Free lunch once a week, drinks and snacks? Awesome, but again, not enough to keep an employee.

5. Money: Yes, yes if I had it might way this WOULD NOT be on the list. Unfortunately, after recent interviews (3-4 months ago) I've learned that the value of a developer has little to do with skills or the companies needs but more so their budget. Low-balling after two interviews where everything seemed to go amazingly well is a tell-tale sign of a company who is not willing to pay for what they want.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/75565/what-does-a-company...
Maybe it's just my own raging adulthood, but I don't get
the joke here, much less see what would cause you to fall off your bed laughing.

She fears that her computer may be vulnerable to hackers, and believes that Linux users are more likely to be sophisticated computer users who "know what they are doing." Both sound like reasonable assumptions to me.

She finds it creepy that someone she hardly knows went to the bother to look for her on Facebook, and then attempted to "Friend" her. Once again, I have to agree. Speaking only for myself, I tend to take a Groucho Marxian position, and think that anybody who actually wanted to "Friend" me on Facebook must be such a loser as to be someone I'd never actually want to be friends with, and conversely, all of my real friends know me well enough to communicate with me through other, more appropriate channels.

So, tell me: what's so funny? Unless what you mean is really "Facebook considered pointless by adults", in which case I have to concur.
["head", ["title", "HeRF Demo"]],
["body",
["div", {"id": "content"},
["h1", "HeRF - The HTML Rendering Framework"],
["hr"],

This seems almost as painful as writing out html.
Perhaps you should shop laughing and start listening...

1. 90% of the rest of the world has no idea what we do. It's all magic to them. But they're not dummies. So when they say something ridiculous, we should help them, not laugh at them.

2. Most of your future customers will (obviously) come from that 90%. If they sense your attitude, they will take their business elsewhere.

3. Their fears and ignorance = your learning opportunity about your market.

4. She's your aunt, for crying out loud, and she actually bothered to email you. Show a little compasion and be glad. Lots of us never hear from our relatives.
And what if I'm the developer, designer, all at the same time? Why should I do something more painful?
dejb, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you haven't actually been exposed to any form of military training, have you?

While you may feel this to be irrelevant, I can assure you that you aren't quite able to grasp the nuances and evolved thinking behind this type of "performance under stress" training unless you have experienced it firsthand. Being an observer isn't good enough.

It's "brainwashing" only in as much as all other forms of teaching are brainwashing. Which is to say that it is not.
I upvoted this because clearly, if something can hurt you you should know about that before trying it.

But I am interested: was your problem a fundamental one, or were you perhaps not adequately prepared to try this? How much "training" did you do on the concept before trying it? Did you read his books? Go to his workshops?

I have done tremendous "work" (i.e. therapy, workshops, "New Thought" classes) and when I see this, I am intrigued, but my response was to send notes to my friends and to order some books on it. I'll discuss it with my "New Thought" class tonight. I'll discuss it with my wife before telling her about all the magnificent and desirable... etc. But I mean its like all the time, you know?
I think that part was a joke. But the article as a whole is definitely not satire; it's an excellent description of how I and many other people feel in social situations, and a rebuttal of some common misconceptions about us that have been annoying me for years.
I was invited to a Landmark Forum introduction once. It sounded very cult-ish to me. I ended up not going. Anyone tried it?
I'd add commute. It's a big reason I took my current job.
Money, but until a certain treshold. After X per month other factors kick in, specially whom am I working with and what. Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true. People will crush you even if you're doing what you love.
Advice for Graduate Students: Suggestions for a Basic-Research Career
Google Experiments With Social Media Viral Marketing
I agree. However, it's more difficult to find gigs that are looking for consistent 20 hours a week, especially contracting for larger companies. If this is untrue, would you mind sharing your secrets for finding them?
Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true

You mean the opposite is true.
Cool experiment. Dares work well.

OTOH... I recall reading in an online post recently (can't find it) that healthy people vent their anger openly and that anger is a natural thing. It's the getting negative that poisons thoughts.
Validated learning about customers (for startups)
Creative Think - Alan Kay's talk at Creative Think seminar, July 20, 1982
Yuch. Go back to the drawing board.
They aren't blocked, what Bell is doing is trying to block the system! All small ISP's are forced to go through Bell's network, and Bell is trying to charge them higher per gigabyte than they do their own customers, so you have no choice but to go with Bell if you're stranded on their network.
50 Best Business Ethics Blogs
This is the big gap between the Internet generation(s) and previous: when your life wasn't automatically public, there was a much greater aspect of fear to the thought of losing your privacy. I recently was helping my mother to send a large collection of pictures to her own father. I told her that, since the pictures were in Picasa, the simplest method would be to enable the Photo Sync feature for the album, and then send her dad the link to the uploaded album (though not in so few words.) She seemed to be fine with this, until, in a slight rephrasal, I told her that she could send the same link to her sister, because the pictures were "on the web." She froze up at this with a look of shock and revulsion, And told me to take them down. I explained that the link was private, and that no one could access it but the people she sent it to; I explained that people put pictures of their houses and vacations up completely publically all the time, and nothig ever happens to them; I explained that hackers really don't care about her pictures, but she wouldn't listen to any of it. Her response: "loose lips sink ships."
Thanks everyone, pretty much the response I was expecting. I think I will just try harder to find a .com.
... as opposed to now, when you have to plug it into a lump of coal, some radioactive stuff, or some natural gas http://www.theoildrum.com/files/US%20Electric%20Generation%2... ?
OK, I can understand that you want that. We should just ensure that we do not confuse it with insurance.
It's a cult. A co-worker at an old startup has spent upwards of $50,000 with them. It's a more benign cult than the Manson Family but it seems to be as bad as Scientology.
"90% of all human communication is 'I'm still here. Are you still there?'" - Timothy Leary

For many people, words are incidental, and the actual communication occurs based on facial expressions and body language. For those of us who like language specifically for communicating complex and interesting ideas, this phenomenon is exasperating.
Huh?

I think that you may be overreacting a bit.

I immediately called her back, explained what Linux was, how Facebook works, and a little about IP addresses.

This woman was like a mother to me, she laughed herself after I explained everything to her!
For a moment, let's consider a local coffee shop (or, for that matter, Starbucks). As a libertarian, I believe the pricing model for a cup of coffee is the owner's decision, not the government's. Pay for each cup, pay less for subsequent cups, free refills...none of my business. If I don't like it, I can go to another coffee shop or open up my own.

Pipes and wires to my house are a different manner. Unlike with the coffee shop, my local government gave a company an exclusive right to serve my house. No competing companies can run redundant pipes or wires if the original companies aren't offering up good deals. While its debatable whether or not government should offer such exclusivity, it has. So, without government intervention, the companies granted these rights will raise prices to the point of profit maximization -- a level of profit that would lead a rational bidder to pay tons for the exclusive license to serve my town. Think cellular frequency auctions. Instead of auctioning off rights as a means of indirect tax collection, most towns (or states) granted basically free exclusive licenses with the caveat of pricing and service oversight. The natural gas monopoly has to petition the state (at least in Ohio) to raise rates. And, I think the cable companies have to petition the local municipalities. So, I don't blame these companies as they're just doing what their contracts (might?) allow. Instead, I find fault with the local governments for selling their citizens short with bad contracts or oversight boards. Who's watching these government-imposed monopolies?
Me personally? I don't live there.
Despite the publishing date being March 31st it seems that was an April Fool's joke. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541446
If you by that mean single-handedly confirmed that twitter soon will be a even more useless troll haven with a SNR approaching previously thought theoretically impossible values of non-zero tangents, then yes.
Now, if there was a way to link what I ate with how bad smelling or frequent the farting was (Assuming we can get a gas sniffer that can isolate foul smelling farts), we can link how the diet maps to the smell and the frequency. Since everyone's physiology is somewhat different, this should definitely add value.

Also, that was the only intelligent thing I could think of to say on the subject.
I'd put team as part of environment/atmosphere (or vice versa) - I know they arent perfectly matched, but dont the people you work with directly impact the atmosphere?
It works here but...
Please wait... scaning font
Right - hopefully the total vote volumes here end up as a decent proxy. We'll get more sophisticated with this later.
I dont think thats a flaw at all. Dude, look at the people who take boring jobs that pay the bills and see their excitement level towards life itself 10 years later. :\

I dont want things that are ALWAYS challenging, or so hard as to leave me frustrated an unaccomplished at the end of the day. But I dont want an endless monotony of crap.
But will it have good support for w3c standards and a fast JS vm?
InformaScale's "One Click Datacenter" may be worth considering for new AWS applications. See http://www.informascale.com/
Oops - sorry, totally missed this comment when I posted mine. But agreed. :)
Ask HN: Suggestions for PadMapper, Apartment Rental Search
Hi everyone, I got some great suggestions when PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com) was posted in the comments section of a thread, so I was hoping to get some more.

PadMapper is like HousingMaps on steroids. Basically, I built the core when I was looking for a place, and I've been improving it since.

My ability to test on a wide range of platforms is somewhat limited, so if it looks or runs terribly on some browser/machine config, that'd be especially helpful.

Thanks!
http://www.javascriptmall.com/learn/contents.htm
I'm with you and Matt King (for the most part), but there can be distinctions - physical environment, team skill, etc. The two are communicated differently, too.
I'd like this article a lot more if the guy had figured out a way to monetize it.
I would concentrate on a mobile strategy. It is probably very difficult to get anyone to placemark anything without some kind of mobile integration. Additionally, you might want to consider adding incentives for placemarking via gaming mechanics. Or perhaps ride the geocaching trend. There are a few iPhone apps that you can use for brainstorming (for instance, check out GoWalla).
Low Frustration Tolerance: Curse and Blessing
I'm an incredibly big Joel fan, and I think this essay is really well written. But I find something patronizing about this approach, and I have seen in my work with startups that it can lead to disaster, even though I have seen it work in big companies.

Startups are inherently chaotic; we often don't even know what problem we're trying to solve. By shielding developers from this chaos, we can make them more "productive" but are they really contributing to the company's success? I'm not sure they are.

I'd rather enlist the creativity and original thinking of my developers to help find new insights about what customers really want. (Naturally, buying chairs and moving desks is not in this category.)

I've written more about this, so I guess I should just link and be quiet. Thanks for listening.

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/04/built-to-l...
I have never bought a virtual gift as I understand the definition. They're silly. That may change as the interestingness and utility of these social tokens evolves. Today they seem very...Elementary School. Back then if your dream girl gave you a Crackerjax prize you treasured it. I'm not saying they aren't a good business but today I put them in the same stupidity category as gift cards.
Introvert/Extrovert is not a capability as it is a preference. It took some time and pain in my high-school to realize I simply do not enjoy parties and clubs. I was very surprised by it too, since most of my middle school was full of stories about how awesome parties will be.

This is a piece of information which should be made available to young people as early as possible. It's another in the thousands of things schools do not even try to teach, but they should.
The general principle is:

If you want to improve something with respect to some metric, start measuring that metric.
Results from my not so successful attempt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128258
Scientology isolates its victims from their (non-Sci.) family, makes ridiculous claims about the nature of the universe, and sets itself dangerously above evidence-based medicine.

Does Landmark do any of that? A smart guy I know seems happy spending time and money on their product (I don't know about $50k, but is that really evidence of culthood?)
Languages should die
Ask HN: Should I Accept or not this internship opportunity ?
I'm doing an internship in a big international company in Europ and they just offered me to do my next internship with them.

Knowing that :

* I'm in my first year of university in computer science in Canada in a Coop program (4 months internship / 4 months of courses) and that I still have 2 internships left to do

* That my parents are in that same country

* That it might be difficult to find internships back in Canada due to the difficult economic time.

* That I would prefer to find an internship in Ottawa, Canada to be near my girlfriend, to practice my english and to possibly do my internship in a startup (or in that same company if possible - but not as interesting as the work offered in europ)

What do you think of my situation ?
What should I answer ?

Thanks for your advice
I think that you may be overreacting a bit.

Maybe.

It's so easy for a bunch of hackers to fall into "group laugh" that I thought I'd even things out with an alternate point of view.

Sounds like you have a great relationship with your aunt. Good for both of you!
I really don't understand this continued suspicion of the AIG/Goldman flowthrough.

What they did was a textbook case of how to protect yourself against a counterparty going bankrupt. It will be used as a case study one day of how to exercise prudence.

Direct from the conference call that explained their exposure:

"When AIG was rescued, Goldman Sachs had $10 billion of
exposure to the insurance company that was offset with $7.5
billion of collateral as well as credit-default swaps that would
have paid off in the event of an AIG bankruptcy, Viniar said on
the March 20 call."

So Goldman had $10 billion of insurance with AIG. As the insurance started going in their favor, as is common banking practice, they demanded collateral be pledged (treasury securities) that they could seize in the event of bankrupty. This was 7.5 billion worth of collateral in extremely safe treasury bonds. So in the event of default, Goldman would have kept the securities in lieu of getting the cash settlement. Because they did not default, AIG had the securities returned to them and they paid out cash instead (this is the 10 billion number that "went from tax payers to goldman" that everyone keeps saying). The remainder 2.5 billion was the disagreement between the parties as to where the insurance should actually be marked. So to be prudent, they bought CDS protection that would pay 2.5 billion in the event of default.

What is the problem here?
Silly as they may seem, gift cards are a $46.9 billion industry: http://blogs.creditcards.com/2008/04/fed-study-deflates-size...

Now you've just given me a business idea: a gift card that works across different virtual worlds.
Because someone else passed on a link that Digg shortened in a conversation I'm participating in on some level.

People use all sorts of URL shorteners, if I want to see the content they're talking about, my choices are either to click or ask them to shorten it again. And the latter usually interrupts the flow of conversation.