skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is not about high-margin / low-margin laptops at all ... it is simply linked to the terrible Linux popularity :

I am at my third Sony Z laptop (~2k to ~3k laptops). Every time, the first thing I did with them was to dump the original windows partition and install linux . The "windows tax" on them were negligible and did not impact my choice at all, so would Sony do anything for people like me ? Of course not except if a competitor would produce a successful similar hardware with Linux on it, and that doesn't happen because people don't show interest for linux.
The information is enough. I can assure you of that.
Likely yes. But if I had to choose between the original developers and someone that has to maintain 20 different packages, I will chose the original developers.
Employer-provided health insurance is one of the worst things to emerge from the US in the past... what? 70 years? It gives far too much power in the marketplace to employers and very little to the actual users of the insurance - the insured.

Why don't employers provide auto insurance too? They'd get a much better deal via group rates, and we'd be 'better off' because we'd all 'pay less' for auto insurance, right?

The idea of 'benefits' in general being 'expected' from employers is, in itself, a bit crazy - just pay people well, and let them make their own decisions. I'd have thought 'free market' supporters would be all over that concept. Company 401K plans? Generally limit you to high-fee and substandard mutual fund options. Company health insurance plans? One or two options, not something which always fit people very well.

Employer funds in to an employee-controlled HSA was/is a decent middle ground, but HSAs in general seem like they're going to be going away or more limited in availability in the next few years under the Affordable Care Act, which is a real shame.
You forgot: organize a revolution.
There is only one problem. "Land is limited".
And people like to live in single-family homes.
Ive done a bit of research on the subject, and it seems like if you do want to offer your employees insurance and you're a biz or startup of less than 25 people, it's going to be cheaper and better incentivized than it used to be.
http://www.google.com/ig/directory

Ozumandius was never shut down, it was left up in ruins.
Color me critical, but it seems like, basically, the point of this article was to show off exactly how informed in her 'hard-nosed' critiques, and how that is proffered as justification for the obvious bias present in the article.

I also find it interesting that despite the apparent mountains of reading, the author cannot determine any good reason why one might oppose the Affordable Care Act, which tells me that either her bias refused to allow her to accept posed oppositions as valid, or that she simply doesn't care that other people do object.

I think there are plenty of valid reasons for opposing it, just as there are plenty of reasons to support it, and frankly, I think all of major justifications on either side of the argument fall into the category of fairly obvious.

That said, kudos on choosing to provide health care immediately. It is a tough decision, and it will affect the company's bottom line, but despite that, if you're an employer who believes that everybody should have affordable health care, it is the obviously correct choice.
Direct link: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-in...
Yeah, 2.x versions are only updated with security-related patches.
I don't think he's playing himself up so much as he is presenting a struggle of whether or not to provide it and the realization that he must (not from a legal, but from a moral perspective).

And while it may be common in the tech industry (where VC money can make it easier -- and frankly its hard to recruit w/o it), it's less common outside of the tech industry.

I still think it is odd to tie health insurance to employment, but given that this is the case today, I do think that I'd do the same as a small business owner. If I couldn't afford it (at least by the medium-term), I think I'd have to question the feasibility of my business.
Unless a large portion of the marketplace for those goods and services moves to the currency's p2p client itself, at which point it becomes trivial to integrate price levels (i.e., a "basket of goods and services") into the protocol.

Imagine if an expanded ebay marketplace, including a wide range of goods and services, were integrated into today's Bitcoin protocol.

Unlikely, and very hard to implement, but not impossible.
Iron Penguin: First open-source "Iron Man" suit within reach?
Given the US Constitution's "general welfare" clause, I'm not sure why nation health care options are such a hard thing to get passed and put in to place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Welfare_clause#United_S...
That would require you to enable global site- packages for that virtualenv.
My favorite at the moment is: AngularJS, Angular UI bootstrap, express.js or Scalatra for backend, mongoDB, TypeScript. WebStorm IDE.
So what you are saying is that since they may not have had a chance to win it's okay that someone cheating got ahead of them?
Hey, I do believe there's an elephant in this room!
Who knew a fellow Landow grad knows how to code? ;)
Indeed, it's always a pleasure to work with them. Having worked with Jonas before, I can say that they are extremely competent and deliver great customer support. Ask a question by mail and you will get a detailed answer instead of random boilerplate text.
Indeed. We might have been in a better place (overall).
If it's installed globally then it wont have access to the libraries installed only in the virtualenv. I think there's a way to work around this, but I haven't taken the time to look into it.
Köszönöm szépen, de nem minden amcsi tehetetlen a nyelvekkel.
How was the event? Still sorry I couldn't make it. Looks like it was a lot of fun.
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award
(2 time and current 911 Owner here)

"Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable."

True. Would add that the seeds were planted for me to want one of these many years ago.

"But that care (sic) was very hard to drive."

Also true even with the current model. I also owned a mini cooper s a few years ago and that was much easier and actually much more fun to drive.

"These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car."

Having a car that goes from zero to 60 so quickly and corners so well doesn't have much utility unless you happen to live near a race track or in the country where there are winding roads and limited police presence. Acceleration of 0 to 60 in, say, 4 seconds when you take away the amount of time to get up to the point on the power curve where the fun starts give you about 1.5 seconds of thrill. Before you know it you are at 70mph on a 40mph road and have to slow down.

"But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice."

Especially if you have to cart around adults. The two rear seats in the 911 won't hold an adult.

What's interesting about your comment is that since I have no idea about Arc I would automatically assume that PG is right in what he says. Even though knowing about the 911 I can see your argument and know you have a point.

Add: I love the 911 but sometimes I wonder how much of that love is manufactured in my head. Actually I think a large portion of it is but I'm still happy. It's like trying to analyze why breasts are nice to look at. They just are.
Genetic algorithms only work in an environment designed for supporting the process, including coddling less-fit members of the population. They're barely comparable to real natural selection.
In Denmark we have completely free medical treatment - I used to live in Switzerland where they have a system where you have to get a health insurance. I had to visit the doctor once to remove some stitches I got from an accident while travelling. The first thing they asked for when I arrived at my doctor was for me to fill out an insurance form - before that they didn't even ask what kind of medical treatment I would need.

I have never felt more offended. I consider it a human right to have access to health care. Why would the state not provide this? Everyone needs it, you can't live without it.
Testing is sometimes problematic from a security POV. Since it's considered a staging area rather than a "proper" distribution, it isn't security-managed, and occasionally vulnerabilities can persist for an extended period of time.

The most common case:

v1 of a package is in Debian stable. v2 comes out, is uploaded to unstable, migrates to testing. Later, v3 comes out, is uploaded to unstable, but its migration to testing is temporarily blocked because it's waiting on a major upgrade, like a new libc version, to make it into testing, which typically is done in a carefully coordinated way.

Now a security issue is found affecting all versions of the package. The upstream will (hopefully) release a patched v3, which will immediately go into unstable. The Debian security team will backport the patch to v1, and make it available to Debian stable users on security.debian.org. But testing is still distributing a vulnerable v2. There is typically no process to specifically patch v2 just for testing, because testing is staged via migrations from unstable; the usual situation is just to wait for blockage to clear and for v3 to migrate. There are occasional exceptions, mostly near releases: if it's determined that v3 won't be able to migrate before the next stable, a specially patched v2 may be uploaded to testing to get it into the next stable.

That scenario doesn't happen that often, but it's worth being aware that testing can lag behind both stable and unstable in security updates.
The quality of higher education in India is just bad (I am originally from India) making it more about the degree* than about education itself. Given this, copying assignments is rampant as it is an economically sensible step to getting the degree (without having to also getting the education). A part of the problem is also that the professors themselves are barely good (as such I come from a very reputed engineering college) to provide quality education for those who actually care about it. Students had no trust on the course syllabus itself. So they would copy the assignments for the degree, and if interested, would pursue self-study for the education.

A student in my session once remarked that these colleges are still very reputed because ultimately the students coming out of the colleges are still very good. This is not because of the college though -- The students going "in" have to be extremely good in the entrance exams to get into the college* .

Based on the advice a relative gave me, I balanced my efforts between the degree and education (given the two do not overlap as much) to maintain just average grades in college purposefully. If my grades in the last semester were better than the average, I would reduce my degree/assignments effort while increasing my education efforts studying in the college library.

I do not think this is limited to India though. I was teaching assistant for a course at a reputed US university, and found a programming assignment for a group of 17 oriental students to be exactly the same. So it was clear that only one of them had actually done it. Until I found that one of the students did not even remove the original author's name from the assignment (!) and this name was none of the 17!

Another incidence I recall from the same US university is when some 38 out of 40 students were proven to have copied the assignments. The explanation the teaching assistant gave to the professor was that it was not a good idea to have an assignment due just two days before the final exams.

PS: I am not suggesting of course that cheating in the Code Jam is justified by any means. Just trying to explain where the cheating culture is coming from.

* Keep in mind the significantly higher population as well as population density in India as compared to say the US, which amongst other things makes the market very competitive.
Yes. Why would you think otherwise?
That was one of his points: There are no good reasons to be against the Act. I can't really judge if that is true, but basically, the idea that it is absolutely right to try to get as many people as possible insured is pretty powerful. And most of the opposition one noted was on the level of "that is socialism!" (which it isnt, and socialism isn't bad).
Ask HN: First time in San Francisco. Please Help?
I'm coming to SF in couple of weeks from now.

I will stay in SF for about 1 month, and work for onsite for one IT company there.

So I have few questions for all of you dear HNers.

My company is based near "Beale St".

I have found large number of restoraunts, and fast-food places to eat.
Do you have some recommendations for places to eat on lunch break? (It would be ideal if there is park where one can eat lunch in nature). Also it seems to me that food is bit pricey in SF.

Do you have recommendations for some normal bar, where I can go out to relax for one or two beers?

Is there any monthly subscribtion to public transporation, buses cable cars?

Also I need unlimited 3G data plan for smartphone. Should I go with www.boingo.com or just buy some of prepaid plans offered by ATT / T-Mobile.

Is there Lanundry cleaning and ironing service that is reliable and not to expensive (on weekly basis)?

Cheers
Why I Develop For The Mac
There about two features that matter in consumer mail: storage quota, multi-location/mobile availability (not a fixed single client machine), and spam.
Do you have any good examples? I'd like to try Flask, but the only examples on the flask site are very, very small sites, and don't help at all with learning to structure something larger.
Since we cannot even fund IHS for a full year at a time with significantly less people than the entire US population, I think you might want to look at what the actual funding versus cost would be.

http://richheape.com/american-indian-healthcare.htm
Outside of the US Dell won't sell you a laptop with linux or no OS. I tried enquiring in th UK about the ultrabook that's on sale with Ubuntu in the USA and was told no, no chance. This was a business enquiry too, not just consumer.

It was a few months back so I guess it could have changed.
It's just the market that has gone in this direction.

As mentioned previously, it used to be the case that you could make a living off of making custom PCs and selling them for a premium. You can still actually do this, charging for a 15% premium or something like that, and make a part time job out of it. But then you have to provide services such as overclocking and water-cooling. Back in the days of XP and Vista, all you had to do was assemble a system from OEM parts and sell it. You could offer higher quality parts + a Windows OS + better performance/price ratio and still be profitable because the system you made would still be cheaper than a pre-built computer.

The thing that has changed is, as I said, the market. You can't do that anymore because the margins are prohibitively small. You need to buy in bulk and sell in bulk to make any kind of money.

But that's not an issue with Microsoft or this secure boot thing, that's just the way that prices have changed in the market. A lot of companies can no longer afford to sell systems without the extra money from MS sales and the bloatware. It was never all that profitable to sell Linux machines to begin with, and it's even harder now. But it's still possible. It's just that you have to sell huge numbers of them, more than before, in order to stay afloat.

Another thing that you have to take into account is that it's a niche market to begin with. Most people who enjoy Linux also know how to manage it, know how to assemble a computer, and would prefer to set up the software/hardware themselves rather than have a company do it for them.

I could be wrong in some of what I have above but that's my understanding of this whole issue.
"and immediately I was able to see that the Porsche"

That also happens with, say, movies. A really good movie about something that you normally wouldn't care about (in my case, say Sports) will be enjoyable by people who typically aren't interested in the subject many times.
Interested in the sample app as well since I was looking for examples like this.
yes unfortunately back in the 50's the big auto companies did a deal to include healthcare as part of wage negotiations. Which derailed the USA's progression to a German style model of healthcare.

If you talk to Alan Mulally and any on the AFL-CIO off the record they would agree - that in hind sight it was a bad deal both for the workers and the employers.
While I agree that benefits tied to employment, rather than the individual, is a very big problem, it is also the only economical path currently for medical insurance. Scale and contracts that a company can negotiate aren't there for individuals. Every year for the last decade, you hear about insurance companies raising individual and small business rates.

For profit companies managing what ostensibly a shared risk pool is another bone of contention for me. I can't find the actual reference at the moment (typing on iPhone) but legislation has been put in place requiring minimum percentages of premiums that must be spent on coverage rather than "overhead".

Also, a minor nit, not all companies offer up bad 401k plans. As an early employee at a couple of startups, I've helped hr pick the better options given rather than the first one peddled.
> It's a survivor behavior.

That's not an explanation. This is not how evolution theory explains stuff.

CORRECT: Features are selected because they are useful.
INCORRECT: Features occur because they are useful.

But most of the evolutionary explanations are expressed in the second way. Recognition is tightly correlated to awareness and consciousness, which in no way have been, yet, explained by evolution. Yet. Although there are voices that say that it is impossible in principle for consciousness to occur by means of mere matter.

It might be that consciousness is like 7+6 in a dice trow. No matter how many times you throw a pair of 6 faces dice, you will never get that combination.

Right now it is assumed that in the future neuroscience will show how the brain works and gives us the mind. Until then, it's an hypothesis. A belief. Not a religious belief, but part of a metaphysical view on the world, that is, there is only atoms. Not a religion, but close.
this manifests itself in the job market as well, as people from the same culture/background "help" each other get positions/contracts. then again, isn't this what humans have always done, tend to their own? I mean, if you identify with a group, you naturally show some loyalty to that group.

Because I've lived in several countries and somewhat assimilated different cultures as my own, I personally don't identify with any one group enough to do this. So among cross-cultural people I can say they/we tend to the opposite. Just from personal experience that is...
If the economy of the future runs on our data, does that make us slave labor?
I'm genuinely interested in your positions of opposition to the Affordable Care Act, if any. You're right in saying the OP did not provide any, and I'd be curious to hear some cohesive argument against it that doesn't necessarily tow a party line.

As far as the general timbre of the article, I would say it's pretty plainly stating that 'whether to provide healthcare?' offers no moral gray area whatsoever, and that it's a plain obligation on behalf of the employer.
I wish the author would at least delve into why he thinks Sublime Text 2 is "an unfinished and slightly buggy piece of software being labelled as “final” and released as Sublime Text 2.0".

In my experience it's been as stable as any other no beta version of software, and with respect to it being unfinished, I would ask "How so?". You typically expect all the major features that were in it at the time it become 2.0. Any other new major features are fair to leave to 3.0 unless the author has previously promised otherwise.
There's no real argument, but he had to say that in order to not be sidelined as an extremist.

I know it sounds insane, but the average American's idea of nationalized healthcare is something akin to waiting in Soviet Union breadlines just to get an aspirin. There's a whole cadre of talking heads employed full-time to make the rounds on Fox News et al promoting this sort of willfully ignorant line of thought.
We can discuss Austrian economics until the cows come home, but in the mean time, the US spends nearly twice as much as the UK on healthcare (as a percent of GDP) [1] and 45,000 Americans die every year due to lack of coverage [2]. I'm glad reform is happening. I wish it were more aggressive.

1: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how...

2: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-find...
Why don't employers provide auto insurance too? They'd get a much better deal via group rates, and we'd be 'better off' because we'd all 'pay less' for auto insurance, right?

Would we pay lower rates? Auto insurance is mandatory if you want to drive. Everyone has it (well a very high percentage of drivers). There's a relatively competitive market for auto insurance. I'm not sure moving it to employers would change things all that much.

I do think that employer provided health insurance is odd, but I don't think the alternative is "free market". We have to incentivize healthy people to get insurance too, just as we have good drivers that get auto insurance. It seems like we need to make health insurance mandatory or move to universal health care. Neither are very likely in my lifetime.

Also most employers give employees the option to opt out of health insurance, and you get some amount of the money back as additional pay. Virtually no one takes this option.
Original Source:http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coder...

The submission's url just has some editorial fluff that doesn't say anything useful and has no extra information. Would be a shame to give them the traffic for essentially cut paste + crappy commentary.
Also happens with people's faces. A person who at first might appear ugly I've found gets better looking the more you see them. They don't become good looking or anything but appear less ugly.
None of the releases deemed final accept any new features. It's general release policy for any FLOSS project, and only neglected on rare occasions.
I'd actually be quite interested to see polling data on this. I wonder if, given the choice, most Americans would choose to continue funding wars/national security or fund healthcare for all. I would actually imagine wars would win in a landslide unfortunately.
Seems like a non-sequitur?

The problem with the way that Native Americans are treated in the US is a lack of political will and the totally fucked power dynamic between the political institutions that have (or have not really) developed in the shadow of Western dominance of the continent.

Canada has universal healthcare and health outcomes for the First Nations are poorer there too. It's really not an apples to apples comparison, since there's so much other fraught bullshit involved.
You don't want to rely on the computing power at the client side, do you? :)